The Tyranny of E-mail (19 page)

But awkward as it sometimes feels to be inside it, our body, as
it turns out, is the best, most sophisticated interface for appropriate communication. It has multiple valences; it has smell, touch, taste, and sight. It allows us to keep ourselves in check by providing real-time, continuous feedback from another person: facial expressions, the slightest twitch of an eyebrow, gestures, pauses, eye contact, the squeeze of an arm. Our bodies often embarrass us. “Man is the sole animal whose nudity offends his own companions,” wrote Montaigne, “and the only one who, in his natural actions, withdraws and hides himself from his own kind.”

The desire to transcend our fleshly envelope, to find a purer, more seamless form of talking and being is understandable— Emerson’s transparent eyeball was in fact an extension of that wish. Communication technology, however, has been catering to that desire with increasing ability, from the telegram to the telephone, even if it is, in an idealized way, putting us right back into the
idea
of our bodies. It’s a temporary relief, as we’re discovering, sometimes not one at all. In Nicholson Baker’s novel
Vox
, a man and a woman talk over a sex hotline. “I called tonight I think out of the same impulse,” she says, “the idea that five or six men would hear me come, as if my voice was this
thing
, this disembodied body, out there, and as they moaned they would be overlaying their moans onto it, and, in a way, coming onto it, and the idea appealed to me, but then when I actually made the call, the reality of it was that the men were so irritating, either passive, wanting me to entertain them, or full of what-are-your-measurements questions, and so I was silent for a while, and then I heard your voice and I liked it.”

There’s a paradox here to this woman’s experience on the chat line. The disinhibiting factors of the telephone that allow her to perform her own orgasm before a group of strangers for the same reason also work on the other participants on the line:
they can bark requests, relax in passivity, measure and assess nakedly and publicly, but without having to be seen. The same is true for written interactions over the Internet, but even more so. As Goleman says, “The Internet has no means to allow such realtime feedback (other than rarely used two-way audio/video streams). That puts our inhibitory circuitry at a loss—there is no signal to monitor from the other person. This results in disinhibition: impulse unleashed.”

Another explanation of disinhibition leads back to the brain, having less to do with our “filters” and more with nuts-and-bolts functionality. One of the fastest-growing areas of neuroscience is the study of mirror neurons, highly active cells in our nervous system that, when we watch an action performed by another person, “fire,” sending pulselike waves of voltage across cell membranes and creating the sensation that what we are watching is actually something we are doing or experiencing ourselves. Transcranial magnetic stimulation—the sending of low-voltage electric charges to parts of the brain to study its functionality— has confirmed this research.

The study of mirror neurons is still developing, but it is beginning to shed light on motor and language development, and also empathy. We may cry at the sight of a sad friend, screw up our face when we see someone react to a bad smell, or cringe when we see someone punched, because we are mirroring what she is experiencing. Research by the French-German neuroscientist Christian Keysers at the University of Groningen Social Brain Lab and others has shown that people who identify themselves as empathic on self-questionnaires have stronger mirror neuron activity.

The ramifications this research presents for communicating over e-mail are enormous. The visual absence of the person we are in exchange with deprives us of a deep-seated, physical identification
with the actions and emotions of others. Marco Iacoboni, the author of
Mirroring People
, says the effects of this are writ large on the Internet: “The rudeness and aggressiveness over the internet—e-mails, blogs, Web forums, etc.—is likely due to the fact that people cannot look into each other’s faces and cannot activate mirror neurons, thus cannot activate a very basic process of empathy for other human fellows.”

Streams of invective trickle down message boards; comment queues of blogs are marinated in snark, with people blasting the host or one another with angry put-downs. Feedback sections of video-broadcasting sites, such as YouTube, are often a study of life without empathy. At the X Games in 2007, the skateboarder Jake Brown survived a horrifying four-story fall while attempting to land a 720—two-spin (rotation)—on a 293-foot half-pipe called the Mega Ramp. Brown completed the 720 but lost his skateboard on the final ramp, falling fifty feet to the ground and landing with such force his shoes exploded off his feet. For four agonizing minutes, he lay unconscious, potentially paralyzed or dying. “Ha ha ha ha ha ha,” wrote one viewer in the comment queue of a YouTube posting of the video. “HIS SHOES POPPED OFF. LOL LOL,” wrote another.

Brown ended up walking away from his spill—indeed, in July 2008 he made a successful return to the Mega Ramp— so clearly his hecklers weren’t nearly as forceful as his internal willpower. But there are other instances in which disinhibited jeering from the sidelines can cause grave damage. Young kids, such as Megan Meier, who spend more time online than any other group, are in the line of fire of Internet-related disinhibition. A recent study conducted at a middle school in the United States revealed that 17 percent of the student body had experienced some form of cyberbullying, whether it was hostile and threatening e-mails, demeaning posts on Facebook or
MySpace, or videos or pictures posted on YouTube without their permission.

Children and teenagers, whose prefrontal cortexes are still developing, face increasing risks over the Internet, since they are just beginning to learn their inhibitions. “During adolescence there is a developmental lag,” Goleman has written, “with teenagers having fragile inhibitory capacities, but fully ripe emotional impulsivity.” This leads to flaming and even harassment of teachers. In 2007, Danielle McGuire, a teacher at the New York prep school Horace Mann, discovered that some students, who happened to be children of school trustees, had put up a page on Facebook entitled “McGuire Survivors 2006,” portraying her as a witch and a liberal brainwasher. When she asked the school to deal with the situation, she was shocked to discover that the trustees wanted her disciplined for accessing their children’s Facebook pages. After a school-wide disruption, the students were given a slap on the wrist and McGuire was later told the school would not be renewing her teaching contract.

Disinhibition also increasingly leads to sexual bravado. It used to be that teenagers passed notes in class; now, it seems, many of them are e-mailing or texting naked photos of themselves—or others—back and forth. In Santa Fe, Texas, school administrators confiscated dozens of mobile phones after naked pictures of two junior high girls began passing from inbox to inbox. The girls had sent their pictures to their boyfriends, who, like the boyfriend of Claire, who was made infamous for her joke about oral sex, passed them along. In Wisconsin, a seventeen-year-old was charged with child pornography after he posted naked photos of his sixteen-year-old ex-girlfriend on MySpace after she broke up with him. In some cases, naked photos of teenagers have wended their way back to parents.

There’s an irony to this state of existence. The computer and e-mail were sold to us as tools of liberation, but they have actually inhibited our ability to conduct our lives mindfully, with the deliberation and consideration that are the hallmark of true agency. We react impulsively, quickly, and must face the consequences later. Our minds, augmented now by the largest, most usable database in the world, are hampered in basic functions such as showing kindness, restraint, and empathy. Digital believers will say that this is just the messiness of true democracy, that we all need to have thicker skins—that there are downsides to all change and the only thing we can count on is change, so adapt or be de-evolved from society.

But if we want to truly have power as individuals, we will preserve the right to push back on this electronic environment that has become such a key component of our day-to-day lives— to tinker with it and, if that doesn’t work, resist its basic assumptions as best we can. In coming decades, we’re going to have to think hard about whether we want to challenge the urgency, ubiquity, and Wild West quality of electronic communication— because doing so might mean shedding some of the trappings of this newly augmented, free-floating idea of ourselves in order to return to a life where things go a little more slowly.

In the ongoing television drama
Star Trek: The Next Generation
, one of the creepiest invasion threats comes from a race of cybernetics-enhanced aliens called the Borg. Zipped into bodysuits crenellated with wires and exposed electronics, their headsets gouging deep staplelike grooves into their humanoid flesh, they make a gruesome spectacle of a constantly connected life-form. The Borg—there is no singular—do not operate as individuals but as a hive, their minds plugged into a collective consciousness that they experience in their heads as thousands of voices speaking all at once. The Borg’s goal is perfection, and they achieve it by adapting the biological and technological innovations of other species. “You will be assimilated,” they state matter-of-factly upon encountering crew ships. “Resistance is futile.”

It’s hard to find a more potent metaphor for the dangers of the man-machine melding that we have experienced in the last fifty years. Science fiction may not always predict the future, but it is often a brilliant countermythology—a visible cultural symptom—of our prevailing anxieties. Is this the direction in which we are going or how we feel now? A collective society all talking inside one another’s heads, in search of perfection, constantly plugged in? It’s an extreme example, perhaps, but it’s important for us to step back to look at the social implications
of our ever-proliferating, ever-accelerating forms of communication technology. It’s a task that is harder than ever, given how e-mail has pulverized our days into bite-sized moments of attention.

In fact, one doesn’t have to reach forward into science fiction to examine the ramifications—and extremes—of our plugged-in world. We can simply turn back the clock a hundred years to the technology that began this journey to our hyperconnected now—the telegraph—and the people who operated it. Indeed, the creation of the Internet and the explosion of e-mail as a communication tool have turned everyday office workers into the telegraph operators of the twenty-first century.

Speed was valued above all else: the fastest operators were known as bonus men, because a bonus was offered to operators who could exceed the normal quota for sending and receiving messages. So-called first class operators could handle about sixty messages an hour—a rate of twenty-five to thirty words per minute—but the bonus men could handle even more without a loss in accuracy, sometimes reaching speeds of forty words per minute or more.

One hopes we never get to the point that sending sixty e-mails per hour is normal, but it’s worth remembering that telegraph operators were merely
transcribing
messages, they weren’t creating them. Still, at two hundred e-mails a day and growing, the average office worker isn’t trailing far behind this pace, and the cognitive and emotional juggling required to maintain this rhythm is leading us toward a situation that many telegraph operators experienced: burnout. Telegraph operators regularly lost their tempers; they changed jobs a lot; and some even had
breakdowns due to stress. New communication technology is supposed to—and constantly promises to—make our lives easier, but the prevalence of e-mail and its burdens is sending us in the same direction as those men and women who, a hundred years ago, lived out on the electronic frontier.

According to the social psychologist Christina Maslach, who created the first diagnostic inventory of burnout, there are three trademark symptoms: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a reduced sense of individual accomplishment. “How much time do you spend sorting through e-mail?” she asks in
The Truth About Burnout.
“The power of technology is paid for in both time and money.” It’s also paid for in workers’ health.

This sort of workplace stress cost America $300 billion in 2004. That same year, it cost England 13 million working days. In one English study of thirty thousand workers, mental health problems that could be traced back to stress were the second leading cause of missed work after muscle-related issues such as bad backs. It’s an issue around the world. Another survey of 115,000 people in 33 countries discovered that excessive work hours and expectations had made work a major cause of health problems. Thirteen percent of the respondents had trouble sleeping at night due to workday concerns. Forty percent of the people who responded said that taking sick days made them feel guilty.

The fact that this rapid speeding up of our jobs is occurring at a stage of capitalism’s evolution toward a hyperinter-connected global marketplace where corporations can leverage employees against competing job applicants in lower-wage markets and the increasing use of workers in “nontraditional” work arrangements—such as freelancers and part-timers, many without health insurance or other benefits—makes resisting the process even harder.

The Internet bubble has long since burst, along with the
housing bubble, but our culture has yet to shed its hyperventilated business expectations. Entrepreneurs and workers who can’t deliver are failures. “If you work in the Internet business, you’re a 25-year-old with a $30 million initial public offering (IPO),” wrote Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin in 2000. “Anything less means you’re an abject loser.” Companies have constructed their business model around perennial double-digit growth. Getting this growth requires some draconian measures. In March 2008, Jason Calacanis, the CEO of Mahalo.com, drew waves of criticism when he posted “How to Save Money Running a Startup” on his blog. The list included holding meetings over lunch, buying employees computers so they can work at home and after hours, investing in a good coffee machine, and most controversially, “fire people who are not workaholics.”