The Tyranny of E-mail (10 page)

The anxiety produced by this much-increased interconnectivity trickled down, as people who thought and wrote about communication and traveled in business circles foresaw a new era descending upon them. Commentators began to worry that somehow, a more civilized time of communication was being Morse-coded out of existence. “We are in great haste to construct
a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas,” goes a famous comment by Henry David Thoreau, “but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” Progress began to take on the dimensions of Icarus’s flight. “Our desire to outstrip Time has been fatal to more things than love,” wrote an editorialist in the
London Star
in 1901. “We have minimized and condensed our emotions…. We have destroyed the memory of yesterday with the worries of tomorrow…. We do not feel and enjoy; we assimilate and appropriate.” The writing desk of that era wasn’t a place of leisurely communication but rather an indictment: “In the secret drawer the checkbook nestles comfortably close to a few brief notes and telegrams that make up the sum of modern sentiment.”

Since most people didn’t send and receive telegrams regularly, the telegraph made the biggest impact in their lives by increasing the scope of the world it brought to them. This new, globalized sense of now would soon test the limits of human empathy. Small-town residents in the United States suddenly found it difficult to put local news into the context of large-scale disasters around the world. One newspaper, the
Alpeno Echo
in Michigan, defiantly shut down its incoming telegraph service, tired of becoming the world’s echo chamber rather than a record of its own community. “It could not tell why the telegraph company caused it to be sent a full account of a flood in Shanghai, a massacre in Calcutta, a sailor fight in Bombay, hard frosts in Siberia,” Standage wrote, “and not a line about the Muskegon fire.”

Many dilemmas of our own age can be glimpsed in the nineteenth century’s convergence of the technologies of the railroad
and the telegraph with the introduction of standardized time. Information overload is beginning to create a free-floating anxiety. In
American Nervousness
, George Miller Beard discusses the impact of the increasing burden of time in the workplace. In one section, describing the modern man who has turned his watch into a fetish object, he writes:

Before the general use of these instruments of precision in time, there was a wider margin for all appointments… men judged time by probabilities, by looking at the sun, and needed not, as a rule, to be nervous about the loss of a moment, and had incomparably fewer experiences wherein a delay of a few moments might destroy the hopes of a lifetime. A nervous man cannot take out his watch and look at it when time for an appointment or train is near without affecting his pulse, and the effect on that pulse, if we could but measure it, would be correlated to a loss to the nervous system. Punctuality is a greater thief of nervous force than is procrastination of time. We are under constant strain, mostly unconscious, oftentimes in sleeping as well as in waking hours, to get somewhere or do something at a definite moment.

Beard’s analysis of the woes of the nervous man were part of a worldwide fad of diagnosing as neurasthenia the mental exhaustion of mostly upper-class individuals involved in sedentary employment. William James popularized the diagnosis, dubbing it “Americanitis,” since Americans seemed particularly prone to the disorder due to their stressful business environment and the rapid urbanization of their society. Given how many symptoms were grouped under the rubric—everything from
chronic fatigue syndrome to irritable bowel syndrome (though these afflictions were not called by those names back then)—it seems more plausible today to treat the rash of diagnoses as a visible symptom itself, the mark of a society undergoing great change.

If we simply swapped his watch for a BlackBerry, would Beard’s nervous American man be recognizable today? Yes and no. In spite of the ubiquity of cellular phones, all of which keep time, watch sales have not plummeted recently; their appeal as accessories of style and status has, in fact, only increased. A watch suggests a serious, sober man even more than before. On the other hand, that nervous man on the run would have a very different sense of now from the now we live under today—or did one moment ago. It’s quite possible this gentleman had a phone in his home, but after shutting his front door and stepping onto the elevated subway, he would effectively have been in a communication blackout until he reached work.

Things change even more when he arrives at the office, where telegrams would be sent and received, and there would be phone calls to take and memos to sign off on. If the man was a lawyer, he would do no typing whatsoever. Men of stature did not type—they dictated. He would also receive very few, if any, letters or notes from friends. Most of the telegrams he received would be short. None of them arrived with an attachment, unless you considered the voice component of a singing telegram, which arrived in 1933, the first one sung by Rudy Vallee, or the Candygram, which Western Union established in the 1960s.

In contrast to e-mail, all of these missives arrived by hand from a messenger boy who could have been a young man looking to get his leg up in business. As late as the 1970s, office buildings in New York City had tubular slots where a telegram messenger could come and pick up messages that had been signaled for
pickup by a bell linked to a central processing station. Before their numbers were thinned out by a pneumatic tube system that carried messages to and from main hubs, Wall Street crawled with these busy runners, who snaked through the city streets and bolted up staircases. The inventor Thomas Edison, who adapted the telegraph to create the ticker tape and later invented the lightbulb, and the financier Andrew Carnegie, both got their start in life this way, meeting men of power by taking them urgent messages. A century later, the novelist Henry Miller also worked as a messenger boy, and subsequently the crisscross connections of the metropolis exploded on his pages:

It’s a human flour mill…. Names and dates. Fingerprints, too, if we had the time for it. So that what? So the American people may enjoy the fastest form of communication known to man, so that they may sell their wares more quickly, so that the moment you drop dead in the street your next of kin may be apprised immediately, that is to say, within an hour, unless the messenger to whom the telegram is entrusted decides to throw up the job and throw the whole batch of telegrams in the garbage can. Twenty million Christmas blanks, all wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, from the directors and president and vice-president of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company.

It’s worth belaboring the importance of brevity in these messages. Telegrams conveyed urgency, but very rarely did they
contain large amounts of text—except those sent through diplomatic and news channels. As a result, telegrams were not used to shuttle complex thoughts from one distant location to the next, even when sent by writers. When his wife gave birth, James Joyce, who was responsible for writing some of the longest sentences since Henry James, cabled his brother
SON BORN JIM
. The editor Maxwell Perkins, famous for his work with Ernest Hemingway, was even briefer:
GIRL
, he telegrammed his mother.

Humor, which depends in part upon brevity’s torque, also flourished over the telegram. Upon arriving in Venice, Robert Benchley wrote to his editor at
The New Yorker
,
STREETS FULL OF WATER PLEASE ADVISE
. Mark Twain once used the device to play a dirty trick upon a dozen well-known men.
FLEE AT ONCE
, he advised them, by telegram.
ALL IS DISCOVERED
. All of them left town immediately. Perhaps the shortest telegram ever sent traveled between Oscar Wilde and his publisher, from whom he wanted to know how sales of his new novel were going. The message: “?” The reply: “!”

Hostility could be conveyed, loud and clear. In 1919, the humorist James Thurber heard from his ex-girlfriend, Minette Fritts, that she had married. He cabled back directly:
WHAT THE HELL
! When William Faulkner submitted the manuscript of
Absalom, Absalom!
, his editor was away and the book fell into the lap of a younger editor, who wrote back criticizing the Mississippi novelist’s syntax and sentence structure. Faulkner promptly responded with a telegram:
WHO THE HELL ARE YOU
? In 1944, Ernest Hemingway got tired of spending so much time apart from his third wife, the war reporter Martha Gellhorn:
ARE YOU A WAR CORRESPONDENT OR WIFE IN MY BED
? Secret lovers, no longer reduced to communicating by code in newspaper classified ads, used it to send missives—also delivered in code. Graham Greene once cabled his mistress, Catherine
Walton, from Morocco in 1948:
DO YOU LIKE ONION SANDWICHES GREENE
, onion sandwiches being code for a sexual act.

Only the very wealthy—or institutionally underwritten— could afford the luxury of such private correspondence over the wires. Very, very few individuals had telegraph lines installed in their homes. Sending a telegram was reserved for important news: announcements of births or deaths, the latter of which were noted with a black-bordered envelope. In some cases, families received yet another telegram when the body of their loved one began its train trip home:
BODY OF MAJ R ROBBINS GOES NORTH TODAY
, one of them read in 1864. In other instances, an early telegram of a wound proved too hastily sent. The family of Yankee soldier Stanley Abbott received a telegram that Abbott had suffered a chest wound.
DOCTOR SAYS NOT MORTAL
, it said. Abbott died the next day.

The cost being what it was, even businessmen and bankers, who by 1860 relied quite heavily on the telegraph, sent just seven to ten telegrams a day. Gradually, however, prices declined and the volume of telegrams increased. In the telegram’s heyday, you could send a ten-word telegram for around twenty cents and a weekend cable from New York to London for just seventy-five cents, or the equivalent of $6 and $18 today, respectively. By the end of the nineteenth century, Western Union was transmitting 58 million telegrams a year and needed to outfit 14,000 uniformed messengers. The company began offering specially designed decorative telegrams, some of which, much later, were designed by Norman Rockwell and other artists.

By 1903, the number of telegrams in all countries around the world reached 1 million per day, with Britain leading the world at 91 million a year. The United States was a close second, followed by France, Germany, Russia, Austria, Belgium, and Italy, in that order. The invention, refinement, and adoption of the telephone gradually chiseled this number down, and the ever-swinging pendulum between written and spoken language swung back toward oral communication. In the United States, there was only one long-distance line in 1885, stretching from New York to Philadelphia. By 1895, the phone system had more than 265,000 miles of wire and was growing exponentially. That year, 750 million telephone calls were made, ten for every man, woman, and child in the United States. And at the turn of the century, telegrams were outnumbered by phone calls fifty to one.

The decline was precipitous after 1945, the year 236 million messages were sent over the telegraph network. In 1950, Western Union tried to relaunch its service by calling attention to the fact that sending words instantly meant something more than hearing a voice on a phone. “A telegram commands
attention—gets results” was its slogan. By 1960, though, telegram volume had dropped to half of what it was in 1945, and by 1970 it was halved again, to 69 million.

Despite their efforts, by the late 1980s telegrams made up just 5 percent of Western Union’s business. The bulk of these were Opiniongrams, messages used to lobby politicians that could be sent for $5.95 for twenty words. During the Iran-contra hearings, 150,000 telegrams piled in with words of disgust and support for Oliver North, the disgraced colonel involved in shipping arms to Iran so that military aid could be funneled to contra rebels via Saudi Arabia. It was a record blip in a failing service, so the company extended its Opiniongram rates to cover messages sent to anyone testifying before a congressional investigating committee.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the world had an incredible array of channels by which to keep up with one another and the news. But all this communication—all this present-tense urgency—couldn’t conceal one overarching problem, one that philosophers have wrestled with incessantly. Time can be standardized, but it is not uniformly felt. As John Berger has written, “Despite clocks and the regular turning of the earth, time is experienced as passing at different rates. This impression is generally dismissed as subjective, because time, according to the nineteenth century view, is objective, incontestable, and indifferent; to its indifference there are no limits.”

The friction between our private sense of time and the objectively observable notion of Time—be it in the news or in the updates of a friend talking to you by telephone—creates the
texture we know as consciousness. It is the source of our subjectivity and our greatest pain and dislocation. Consciousness is what sets us apart from so many other animals and from one another. As our world moved faster, or appeared to, we became left behind and alone. A telephone call, a face-to-face meeting into which we become absorbed, a deeply rewarding mental or physical task, a moment’s prayer might briefly make us forget this fact; but when the silence returns—as it must—we cannot escape the hard truth that we are alone in the world.

None of the technological inventions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gave us a total reprieve from our singularity; they merely swathed it in padded wrapping. People in many countries could get into cars and drive to see one another. The telegraph meant that urgent news could be sent swiftly and business transacted. In the end, though, long-distance rates meant that it was more practical for people who had a lot to say to simply pick up the phone. One could cook or put children to bed and meanwhile carry on a separate conversation. Up until the invention of the fax machine, important memos and business documents were still sent by letter, airmail if necessary.