The Tyranny of E-mail (13 page)

The success of the PC as an extension of our brains and our working selves has been solidified by the ubiquity of e-mail. For many people, opening their e-mail program marks the start of their day. Depending on what comes in, it sets the morning’s priorities and becomes a kind of rolling to-do list, which is why keeping up with it feels so important. You need to clear what comes in before it buries the list of lingering e-mails—the ones that need or require more involved responses—in a pile of electronic silt.

E-mail is asynchronous technology, meaning that two people don’t have to be present for it to work. We send e-mail; it is received and eventually answered, usually the same day. Indeed, one survey of companies found that half of all respondents expected to get back to e-mail queries within four hours. The senders, on the other hand, had a different time frame for how soon they expected to hear back from an e-mail they fired off: they expected to hear back in a day. But as the volume of e-mail increased exponentially, response time decreased: more and more people found that staying atop that ever-lengthening queue kept a clear horizon inside their computer. A quick, easy question got a faster answer since it was something done, checked off, accomplished.

The acceleration of response times, however, began to train people to expect more immediate replies. Everyone has received an e-mail from an impatient coworker or friend asking, two hours later, “Did you get that e-mail I sent you?” Aside from being annoying, such follow-ups reiterate a truth that working over e-mail has made visibly clear in a way never before in the work environment: we’re all connected.

If someone e-mails you asking for a piece of information and you don’t reply until the end of the day, chances are you prevented a piece of work from being completed. Not all e-mailers experience this. But for the average worker, the worker who in 2009 will be sending and receiving two hundred e-mails a day, this is a burden to bear. When you arrive at work and there are twenty e-mails in your inbox, the weight of that queue is clear:
everyone is waiting for you
.

So you clear and clear and clear, only to learn that the faster you reply, the faster the replies come boomeranging back to you—thanks, follow-ups, additional requests, and that one-line sinker, “How are you doing these days?” It shouldn’t be such a burden to be asked your state of mind. In the workplace, however, where the sheer volume of correspondence can feel as if it has been designed on high to enforce a kind of task-oriented tunnel vision, such a question is either a trapdoor or an escape hatch. From it you can spy sunlight, a tiny rebellion from the drudgery. So even, in some cases, if you’re overwhelmed and you haven’t the time to address what in any other circumstances would be a welcome interrogative, you reply. Now you’re chatting. The speed at which e-mail arrives and is returned has begun to reflect early chat room discourse.

Except that e-mail can be so many different things. In some instances, e-mail can be written as properly as a legal letter. In
other cases, it can be informal, misspelled, full of puns, jokes, and emoticons. Each correspondent we have, and each interaction with that correspondent, demands a slightly different register. Some days, you avoid the dangling personal detail and plunge onward. On other days, you pause and open up the door no one really wants to walk through as a make-nice gesture: “How are you doing these days?”

Juggling the flow of messages and the various response styles and registers makes the workday an exercise in linguistic multitasking. If you get a large volume of e-mail, as more and more people do, it’s exhausting—trying to represent or translate all your different moods, tones, personalities, and styles into some sort of textual equivalent. And that’s just the sending, where as a correspondent you have some degree of control over the opening gambit in a conversation, a pretty clear notion of what the message is intended to convey. Replying is even trickier. “When you see an Internet utterance, you often don’t know how to take it,” David Crystal writes, “because you don’t know what set of conversational principles it is obeying.” Novelists work their whole life to be able to capture this variety of their characters’ modes and emotional tones in prose, and now at the rate we are typing messages, many of us are pumping out a hefty epic once a month.

The truth is that text rarely, if ever, can equal the richness of a face-to-face conversation. It’s static, disembodied. It does not convey hand gestures, verbal tone, inflection, or facial expressions, things we are taught from birth to encode and decode. Indeed, these are some of the first things children learn when speaking; even before they can form words, they mimic the cadences and tones of speech they have heard. They gesture. We learn to communicate with our bodies. Talk on the phone with a friend across the globe, and you will discover how hard a habit
this is to break. There are your hands, waving and punctuating, even though your friend cannot see them. It’s hardwired into us. Even the blind talk with their hands.

And this is just the body. Text, until this point, has also had a kind of body: the page. Formal letters came on heavy paper stock; notes dashed off while traveling came on the stationery of hotels; postcards forced correspondents to become prose poets to close the gap between what was on the card and what they were writing; telegrams with a black rim were to be dreaded. Electronic messages are completely devoid of this sensuality; they all arrive in the same format. They have no messenger bringing them there, as an interpreter. As a result, the tone of e-mails is misunderstood more than half of the time, compared to just a quarter of the time over the phone and even less often face-to-face. A Cisco study found that workers who had to collaborate by e-mail for an extended period invariably experienced a breakdown in communication.

Coupled with the sensory brownout that the computer provides and the speed at which e-mail arrives, this means that conversations that go on too long—especially complex, detailed conversations—slide down a slippery slope toward some sort of misunderstanding. Just 6 percent of people in one survey found e-mail an effective tool for bringing up issues with supervisors, and only 4 percent found it helpful in talking about sensitive issues.

For this reason it’s hard to complain about emoticons—at the rate at which e-mail comes in, they perform a necessary function by becoming what the linguist Naomi S. Baron has called a visual language. When a conversation starts veering off topic or into cloudy territory, emoticons hammer it back into shape and ham-fistedly make amends. By aping childishness, they bring us back to basic lessons, such as “Play well with others,
” and then boot us back into action. Most of all, they keep it simple. It’s hard, after all, to misinterpret a smiley face.

Yet the misinterpretations persist and fester, especially if you don’t respond to an e-mail—or if someone never gets back to you. When everyone appears to be replying at warp speed— they must be if you’re getting so much e-mail, right?—the lone silent correspondent is a mysterious siren call. It encourages self-doubt. What was it you did to earn the cold shoulder? Maybe you were never actually worth the time and they just started to heed their instincts. Part of you wants to check in: Maybe the message did get lost? Another part of you doesn’t want to be that person chiming in pathetically from the sideline, “Did you get that e-mail I sent?”

Meanwhile, on flows the e-mail down the screen, like a current with riptides and swirls. Enter it at the start of the day, and you’re off. You paddle frantically and seem to get nowhere. Checking e-mail on vacation, at night, in the car, at the bus stop, or in the grocery store, as handheld devices have made possible in recent years—and as many people do—is like trying to stick a finger in a dam. The flow just finds a new crack, a new fissure, and before long it’s pouring out again. As Mark Twain noted of his river, “The Mississippi will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise.”

Still we try to control it. We set out-of-office autoreplies when we leave an hour early for a doctor’s appointment, and try to get a jump on it by checking it on e-mail-free Fridays, the day some companies have designated for workers to catch a breather from the flow. We sneak a peek before going to work and clock in before going to bed. It’s our midnight snack, our reminder we are needed, the mother of all time killers. Thanks to the speed of our replies, the variety of interfaces through which we now receive e-mail, and the innumerable locales in which we
check it—
can’t type on this freign keybored
—it’s hardly a wonder we mess up, step over the line, send it to a wrong address. And whether it’s our mistake or theirs, someone will hear about it— since e-mail has gone viral.

With e-mail it’s now become easier than ever to share information with other people. We just forward it. If the Swedish man living in Idaho in the last chapter were living today, he could simply send his brother a link to the newspaper article about relations between his home country and Norway. If Howard Moss had received Benchley’s telegram from Venice, he’d probably forward it to someone within the office: “Look at what ole B is up to.” The amount we can share, in an instant, has exploded.

There are enormous practical benefits to this capacity. We don’t have to pick up the phone and give directions; we can just send out a link to a MapQuest page and let the recipient follow the route from there. If someone has been left off a party invite, we can simply forward it to them. Learn something new about a disease that afflicts a family member or get some news about a loved one traveling abroad? We no longer have to wait to pass the information along: we just forward the e-mail or attach the link to a blog post. This capacity has been an enormous boon for groups. As the author, educator, and environmentalist Bill McKibben points out, in spite of e-mail’s ability to destroy productivity, it’s hard to completely discount the tool: “We organized 2,000 demonstrations across the nation last year about climate change and couldn’t have done so without e-mail…. [but] it’s profoundly immature technology at this point, and we
better figure out how the hell to use it without wrecking our lives or we will lose a potentially fascinating medium.”

McKibben is right; e-mail is a great combination of social tool and broadcast tool. If Martin Luther were alive today, he possibly would be e-mailing his theses around instead of nailing them to church doors. But the question remains whether his ideas would be lost in the wash. The forward capacity— which bestows upon individuals a fast, cheap internal Xerox machine—means that information of all sorts travels faster than ever. And we are now more in control than ever of filtering it for one another. One of the most popular features on
The New York Times’
Web site is its “E-mail this” function, which takes the social aspect of newspaper reading and puts it on steroids. Many blogs, which are now read by more than half of all online users, have e-mail tabs at the bottom, allowing opinions and musing and responses to news and information to rapidly reach people who might otherwise never have seen them.

This culture of forwarding stuff—of sharing everything from the esoteric to the essential, or the esoterically essential— contributes to the problem of e-mail overload, since people are far more likely to e-mail a news link than read it out over the phone or print it out and mail it to a friend. The inbox quickly became our primary receiving port for pass-alongs, be they news stories or jokes—if we are at work, they will run shoulder to shoulder with other information that has been forwarded because it is presumably of interest for doing our jobs.

Forwarding—and cc-ing—is an easy way to keep someone informed of developments at work. In a culture of frequent forwarding, though, this has quickly become a mixed blessing. If we want to get the essential mail, we have to do some sifting. When everything can be forwarded quickly and for free, work that wasn’t collaborative before becomes hard to conceive of
doing without linking someone else in, forwarding information to a colleague so that he or she can be
in the loop
. During his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama received
two
daily e-mails from his foreign policy advisers: one summarized the past twenty-four hours of events on the world stage; the other included a series of questions he might field from the media— followed by some suggested answers. These two e-mails were culled from the thoughts and input of a team of three hundred advisers. Imagine if they had all e-mailed him at once, as happens in many organizations. When not regulated, this instinct can lead to a tsunami of useless information. Not surprisingly, shortly after he was elected, President Obama got a secret e-mail address that only a handful of people in Washington know.

No one understands the need to control input more than people at the top of decision queues, such as managers and executives. When most people were loping along with ten to twenty e-mails a day a few years ago, they were already drowning in messages, a barrage that inspired a mild form of hysteria. In 2005, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy painted the portrait of a modern-day executive that sounds more like a telegraph operator: “get hundreds a day, I review them all, answer many, forward many for response, hate the junk, I type really fast, ignore perfect grammer and typin, getting more over time, but can read e-mail from any browser, have T1’s into my homes and read all that is left from the day before I go to sleep after the boys go down and get up before they do to read what came in while sleeping.” It’s hard not to applaud McNealy for his desire to stay informed, but at what point does e-mail undo the job of delegating? Prior to e-mail, work didn’t always have to be observed to get done; now it’s hard to imagine completing a task without having someone virtually watching over our shoulders.

Aside from the torrents of e-mail it creates, there’s an even more problematic tendency that the culture of forwarding unleashes over e-mail: it makes it hard to know when to stop. In many computer interfaces today, all e-mail essentially looks the same. For a significant portion of people, it all lands in the same box and in just a handful of scripts, as opposed to the millions upon millions of unique handwriting styles. There are no identifying, personal factors, save the name of the sender. This lack of cues can be confusing. If work e-mail, information, invitations, inspiring pep talks, and jokes from your dirty sister can all be forwarded, what can’t? In this fashion, one of e-mail’s primary functions has been to explode one of the overarching notions behind so much written communication up until this point, even if governments didn’t always respect it: that it was private.