The Tyranny of E-mail (21 page)

The breaking down of institutions that Trow was commenting upon, places where face-to-face interaction was at a premium, has only been speeded up by the Internet. These days you don’t have to leave the house. In 2000, a twenty-six-year-old north Dallas man pulled one of the more successful publicity stunts of recent memory by legally changing his name to DotComGuy and vowing not to leave his home for a year. The move earned him scores of sponsors—United Parcel Service, Gateway, a gym that sent a trainer to the house so he wouldn’t get too pudgy—and millions of viewers to his Web site, which broadcast his life via live webcams. People spent 2 million minutes watching him in the first four days of his sojourn.

In the wake of the Y2K craze, when suddenly the matrix of computer technology we were becoming dependent upon seemed to have exposed us to a fatal flaw, DotComGuy was a great advertisement for the pleasures of the Internet. Apparently, many people bought into this experience. Online shopping took off, growing from the inception of the Web to a rate of 25 percent per year before slowing—it is the second-most common thing Internet users do after e-mailing—but it’s been at the expense of the real-world commons, that is, the place where one can interact face-to-face in real time, unmediated. Indeed, stores like Barnesandnoble.com began to offer the option to purchase a book online but pick it up in the store for customers who actually liked the chance to be in a physical retail
space. “It’s not like you go onto Amazon and think, ‘I’m a little depressed. I’ll go onto this site and get transported,’” said Nancy F. Koehn, a Harvard Business School professor who studies consumer habits. But it is exactly this instinct that pulls us into a beckoning bookstore.

For those who cherish the corner store, the migration of such a huge range of business onto the Internet couldn’t have occurred at a worse time, because these real-world, middle-distance commons—places where you could interact without the emotional strain of carrying a long conversation—as Trow noted, were already suffering. When William Penn was governor of Pennsylvania, the mail service’s delivery times and routes were simply posted on the meetinghouse door in Philadelphia. This community collective has dwindled drastically ever since. “Within the twentieth-century city of housing,” Joseph Rykwert wrote, “the identifiable places of meeting have been drastically reduced.” Retail outlets, fast-food restaurants, chain stores “convey the message that space has been standardized, that its inflections and associations have been ironed out.”

It’s hard to blame us, then, for retreating into a virtual space, withdrawing more and more into the window of our computer screens to do and say things that are difficult in real life. In making this compromise, however, we are buying into a philosophy of space—an ecology of space that is designed and determined by the systems that drive the Internet. As Mark Rothko has written about art, “If one understands, or has the sensibility to live in, the particular kind of space to which a painting is committed, then he has obtained the most comprehensive statement of the artist’s attitude toward reality.” If we agree with cultural critic Steven Johnson that an interface is art, the question remains: What are the assumptions and worldview of the screen? For starters, one could say a computer screen leads us to
believe that all the world is available from our fingertips; that there are no limits; that there is no time but now. That real space doesn’t matter.

And so, by tying ourselves to this machine, we make a trade: virtual interaction for physical togetherness. The millions of people who simultaneously make this bargain one click at a time have had an enormous effect on the institution that brought us together to begin with: mail. In 2008, with the post office running a deficit of £4 million a week, the British government announced a plan of post office closures that would affect 2,500 branches. Many of them were small, irreplaceable meeting places for their communities. It was a particular blow to the elderly, who pick up their pension and benefit checks at the post office, and the infirm. “We have to remember that there are many who don’t have cars, not to mention many who don’t have home computers,” wrote a man in Shropshire. “And even though there have been improvements to public transport, in rural areas buses don’t always run as frequently as people need.” One of the oldest post offices in the country, operated by the earl of Leicester, was closed. Scores of people complained. One community even made a film in protest. Yet the cuts went through.

This erosion of face-to-face interaction is taking place all over, anywhere people traditionally gathered in public. Instead of going to a movie theater, people can download a film over the Internet; instead of walking into a bookstore to browse, customers simply navigate to an online store; shoppers pressed for time do not visit a local grocer, they buy their produce on FreshDirect or a similar site; pickup bars are losing out to Internet dating sites, auction houses to eBay; casinos don’t have to go offshore anymore, as people can go online to play poker; banks’ queues are diminishing as more and more customers go
online to perform simple transactions or pay bills; garage sales are going away as people hock their old goods on Amazon.com, eBay, and craigslist; even doctors’ offices can be avoided. About the only thing you cannot do from home, at this point, is vote.

This migration into the virtual space is being felt most strongly by people who grew up without it. But a new generation is being raised to take it for granted. Schools and universities, which used to be designed around quadrangles in order to facilitate meetings, have become as eerily silent as offices now that students gather virtually, updating their Facebook pages at a frenzied rate rather than actually talking to one another. In 2000, a
New York Times
reporter visited the campus of Mount Saint Mary College, which had installed campuswide wireless Internet access, then a novelty. The new connectivity was an enormous convenience to many on campus, but it had quickly created a dependency. People were on it all the time. “I’ve never seen a student walking around holding their laptop out to listen to music,” said the network manager, tuning the Internet radio to a new station. “But I’m sure that’s not far off.” The service was absorbed so quickly, the reporter wrote, that students and faculty “developed an automatic reflex to go to the Web for information, no matter where they are.”

As cheap, easily accessible clearinghouses for news that affects people in a particular geographic region, newspapers—another form of public space—are also in trouble, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, where 150 years ago the telegraph gave them a new life and expanded the sense of how far empathy’s tether should reach. Relaxed FCC laws have allowed corporations to buy up and consolidate more media than ever—but it’s increasingly difficult for newspapers to produce the double-digit growth that made them such attractive parts of a media empire. Newspapers typically made 80 percent
of their money from advertising and 20 percent off circulation. Online sites such as craigslist have slowly eaten away at their advertising market, and more and more people are reading the news online. Newspapers are still expected to report and explain the news; they just can’t make money distributing it the same way they used to.

E-mail has played a role in this development. Our inboxes have usurped the morning paper as a shaping context; many of us check it before we even glance at the news, let alone brew that first cup of coffee, making our e-mail (and by extension ourselves) the most important information—the shaping context—of the day. This is an important development. From dawn to dusk, e-mail has become a kind of rolling to-do list that, as more and more information is provided to us electronically—from sales at our local department store to news of a friend’s birthday to important deadlines for work—stretches across all aspects of our life. If this is the first stream of information we dip into in the morning, we begin our days with a contracting sense of the world, rather than an expanding one. The possibility of serendipity, of learning something we don’t already know or at least think we may want to know, diminishes.

This isn’t to say that we cannot get the news delivered to our virtual inboxes. It’s just a very different notion of what news means. Google, for instance, has made it possible to have news delivered to your e-mail address through Google news alerts, which appear embedded in an e-mail as a series of hyperlinks. Simply type in the list of subjects you would like to track, and it will e-mail you alerts as many times a day as you can handle. Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the political blog Daily Kos, which gets upward of a half million visitors per day, told
GQ
he now gets all his news via Google alerts.

Shopping for news this way, however, puts a modern-day reader into the same dilemma that the Michigan newspaper mentioned earlier was in with the telegraph many years ago. Things like Google alerts, RSS feeds sent out by e-mail, or links on your Yahoo! home page often remove local factors—such as your newspaper—as your defining context, your window onto the world, because it depends entirely upon what is written about and reported over the Web. One would think this would present an opportunity for local newspapers, but as more and more of them have been bought up by corporations, forced to use syndicated copy that comes from someplace else, reduced to a skeleton staff of writers and reporters, these papers, which would have stood to benefit from the overload of information provided by the Web, are actually losing out.

Not surprisingly, then, in the United States, the past few years have been bad ones for local newspapers—that, to be fair, were slower to pick up on the possibilities the Web held for reporting and that had fewer resources to market and promote themselves—and very good ones for papers pitched to a national audience, such as
USA Today, The Wall Street Journal
, and
The New York Times.
But even these giants face a larger contextual shift away from news, toward a point-and-hunt attitude to information.

Google is a powerful cultural force, but it alone is not responsible for this trend; the customer has shaped and designed the news without knowing it ever since demographics and ratings became a large part of news reporting, especially for broadcast news. The Web and tools such as e-mail have simply put us more firmly into the role of consumer: What do we want?
The New York Times
has a feature that allows a reader to customize his or her news home page, making their news site into a mash-up of headlines pulled from a series of news sites—from
The New York
Review of Books
to
Sports Illustrated
to the Huffington Post—on a page you design and lay out yourself. What the newspaper itself considers important and newsworthy and where it ought to be placed on your attention span doesn’t matter.

The struggles faced by regional newspapers in the United States—and now in the United Kingdom—does not affect simply the owners and reporters and paperboys; it affects what citizens can know. National news agencies do not have the resources to cover all the news that is fit to print; local papers have been essential in filling in the gaps. They have exposed corruption, graft, abuse, murders, and rapes—defended the weak from the powerful—in a way that never required an economies-of-scale justification. For a story to be reported in these markets, it need only affect the people in the circulation areas. If local news sources— especially newspapers, which form the backbone not just of radio and television but of many of the blogs that have arisen to fill the gaps—are allowed to die on the vine, people in those communities will be deprived of an essential watchdog of the commons. Fighting this trend will be an uphill battle. Many of these newspapers are now owned by people who do not even live in the community. Moreover, we have entered a climate in which our frame of reference has shrunk to the smallest aperture ever.

The nature of screens—and how we work on, over, and through them onto the Internet—has effected a huge epistemological shift that goes beyond merely writing our way into existence. It’s changing how we read and what we read, just as the telegram and organized mail did before it. As Nicholas Carr wrote in his essay on Google, “It is clear that users are not reading
online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”

Some of these changes stem from the interface itself. Newspaper and magazine articles have become shorter, breaks longer, and text bigger to accommodate readers’ fractured attention span. We ourselves create this condition, though, by how much time we spend working in word processing programs and on e-mail. “E-mailers tend—there being no space constraints—to insert a line of space between paragraphs,” writes the humorist and language columnist Roy Blount, Jr., in an e-mail. “If readers get to where they can’t tolerate paragraphs without space between, they will develop an even greater resistance to print; or print will have to put space between paragraphs, which will eat up more paper, make books bulkier, leach even more substance out of newspapers and magazines: contribute further to the decline of print.”

Empirical evidence is flooding in regarding the ways that screen-based reading, which has grown from e-mail, is changing the way we read generally. Eye-tracking studies have shown that people increasingly tend to leapfrog over long blocks of text. We need bullet points, bold text, short sentences, explanatory subheads, and speedy text. People skim and scan rather than rummage down into the belly of the beast. Online readers are “selfish, lazy, and ruthless,” said Jakob Nielsen, a usability engineer, in an amusing article by Slate’s Michael Agger. Instead of explaining concepts in a text, Nielsen advised putting in hyperlinks to other articles where readers can pick up other concepts. Even the most usability-enhanced article and layout, however, can lose out on the Web. “[Spontaneous reading pleasure] can be achieved,” Agger writes, “but the environment
works against you. Read a nice sentence, get dinged by IM, never return to the story again.”