The Tyranny of E-mail (23 page)

The truth remains that it’s not just nature that is lost on e-mail; it’s the true collective. Marshall McLuhan, the so-called godfather of the wired generation, coined the term “global village” forty years ago, when ARPANET was becoming a reality, yet that term remains a dream, not a description. Many groups remain stubbornly untouched by—or unmoved by—the so-called Internet revolution. The elderly, for instance, do not use the Internet or e-mail much. In the European Union, age and education remain determining factors for whether or not people use e-mail and the Internet. A survey conducted in 2004 revealed that people aged sixteen to twenty-four were three times as likely to use the Internet as those aged fifty-five to seventy-four; the same ratios divided those with lower and higher educational levels. Income also plays a factor. In Canada in 2007 a survey showed that 91 percent of people who made $91,000 or more regularly used the Internet; only 47 percent of those who made $24,000 did so. Between 2007 and 2008, the number of Americans who had broadband connections rose from 47 to 55 percent, but none of this growth came from poor populations, even though broadband costs were nearly 5 percent less than they were in 2005.

It’s not hard to see why the poor aren’t nearly so connected. Most libraries in the Western world have computer terminals now, but the hours of operation are not convenient for people who work during the day—or work two jobs, as many of the poor must in order to make ends meet. Most workplaces are connected, but that’s not true for service jobs—where a great deal of lower-income people work—at fast-food restaurants, or in retail stores. Their employees need to be out on the floor selling or flipping burgers or cleaning out plastic booths cluttered with trash. It’s actually against these companies’ interest for their
workers to have Internet access. The same goes for factory and manual labor jobs. Migrant workers do not have computer labs at their “place” of work; neither do millions of people the world over who work in sweatshops, mines, canneries, and sawmills and on road repair crews and short-order cook lines.

Nations, the renowned historian Benedict Anderson argued, are imagined communities. They function based on the agreed idea that people who live in the same geographic area or occupy a similar group can remain in that group without ever meeting face-to-face. “Yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” So a dog walker in Portland, Oregon, and a ditch digger in Portland, Maine, are both Americans—and can both identify as such—and need not see or communicate with each other in order to agree upon that fact.

The Internet is the largest imagined community ever built. But it is also as closed as, if not more so than, the imagined community of nations. For to be online you need money. You need a job that provides a computer, or you must own one; you must possess computer literacy, which isn’t always available for people who drop out of school or do not get schooled at all. It also helps if you have people online with whom to write or send messages—so a group’s reluctance to go online, say certain populations of seniors, reinforces itself. In many cases, particularly in the world’s poorest countries, as much as Internet use and communication would help them, there are far more pressing concerns, such as simply having enough to eat. In 2008, only 5 percent of Africa’s population was online.

In this sense, the Internet and e-mail, while designed to make the world ever more connected, reinforces the already existing gaps. Mighty work is being done by several charitable organizations, such as Nicholas Negroponte’s foundation One Laptop per Child, to help provide computers and Internet access to
more libraries and communities, to get parts of the world wired that still don’t even have dial-up. Helping poorer countries and populations get connected is important work, and it should be done. In the meantime, it is important for those of us who are in the Internet’s imagined community to remember that this digital utopia doesn’t exist for everyone.

In May 1992, Bill McKibben performed a fascinating experiment. He recorded an entire day of television—all ninety-three channels in Fairfax, Virginia—and compared the information it provided with the information acquired in a day spent atop a mountain in the Adirondacks. It was a straw man context, he admitted, since no one can physically watch ninety-three channels at once, but the comparison provided an illuminating argument for what is missing in the so-called age of information. Many people spend a fifth of their waking life before the machine; what is it telling them?

One key ingredient missing from television, of course, is any sense of the natural world and its constant reminder of human hubris. “Even the dullest farmer quickly learns, for instance, a deep sense of limits,” he wrote. “You can’t harvest crops successfully until you understand how much can be grown without exhausting the soil, how much rest the land requires, which fields can be safely plowed and which are so erosion-prone that they’re best left to some other purpose.”

Now that we’re plugged into a different screen, the computer screen, for many hours per day, this denaturing has only increased. Many of us who work in offices don’t touch a single natural substance all day long, from the plastic keyboard to
the mesh fibers on the back of our chair to the faux lacquered tables in conference rooms. These tangible objects are the new machine world, and their message is that human engineering drives the day; our hands, our designs are stamped upon everything. We have forged an environment made for work.

By projecting ourselves into the computer, by imagining it as a surrogate brain, an extension of ourselves, we have bought into a false metaphor that travels with us everywhere our gadgets go. The computer is not a brain any more than our brain is a computer. The computer, for one, is far better at batching and sorting than we are; it can work longer hours. It feels no pain. But we cannot help projecting ourselves into and through it because not to do so would be to recognize how much we live in a world that is outside ourselves—denatured, not human. This paradox puts us into an emotional and physical bind. We have become dependent upon a machine that cannot sense our physical strain and has no intuitive knowledge of our limits, a machine that is immune to sunlight—and in some cases, does not work well under direct light due to the glare. In turn, this relationship has pushed us far beyond our known limits. As Elaine Scarry has written in her treatise
The Body in Pain
, “The act of human creating includes both the creating of the object and the object’s re-creating of the human being, and it is only because of the second that the first is undertaken.” In other words, it is not the machines that are doing this to us: it’s ourselves, because we keep inventing the machines. We have collectively desired this augmentation of our power, our reach, our communication skills. But if we want to change the way we are living and working, we have to acknowledge our limits and the fact that we may have reached terminal velocity a long time ago.

The best hope for emotional maturity, then, appears to lie in recognition of our need for and dependence on people who nevertheless remain separate from ourselves and refuse to submit to our whims. It lies in recognition of others not as projects of our own desires but as independent beings with desires of their own. More broadly, it lies in acceptance of our limits. The world does not exist merely to satisfy our desires; it is a world in which we can find pleasure and meaning, once we understand that others too have a right to these goods.

—
C
HRISTOPHER
L
ASCHE

In a secret way, we have always wanted to speed up to this point—to accelerate into “that instant,” writes Hélène Cixous, “which strikes between two instants, that instant which flies into bits under its own blow, which has neither length, nor duration, only its own shattering brilliance, the shock of the passage from night to light.” In the instant we are everywhere and nowhere, the boundaries of space and time do not matter; we will never die. The instant between 0 and 1.

But the boundlessness of the Internet always runs into the hard fact of our animal nature, our physical limits, the dimensions of our cognitive present, the overheated capacity of our minds. “My friend has just had his PC wired for broadband,” writes the poet Don Paterson. “I meet him in the café he looks terrible—his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot…. He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has now stopped even
listening
to them, and spends his time sleeplessly monitoring a progress bar…. He says
it’s like all my birthdays have come at once
, by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is going to
die
.”

We will die, that much is certain; and everyone we have ever loved and cared about will die, too, sometimes—heartbreakingly— before us. Being someone else, traveling the world, making new friends gives us a temporary reprieve from this knowledge, which is spared most of the animal kingdom. Busyness numbs the pain of this awareness, but it can never totally submerge it. Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change. In short, we need to slow down.

Our society does not often tell us this. Progress, since the dawn of the Industrial Age, is supposed to be a linear upward progression; graphs with upward slopes are a good sign. Processing speeds are always getting faster; broadband now makes dialup seem like traveling by horse and buggy. Growth is eternal. But only two things grow indefinitely or have indefinite growth firmly ensconced at the heart of their being: cancer and the corporation. For everything else, especially in nature, the consuming fires eventually come and force a starting over.

The ultimate form of progress, however, is learning to decide what is working and what is not; and working at this pace, e-mailing at this frantic rate, is pleasing very few of us. It is encroaching on parts of our lives that should be separate or sacred, altering our minds and our ability to know our world, encouraging a further distancing from our bodies and our natures and our communities. We can change this; we
have to
change it. This book has been an attempt to step back from the frenzy and the flurry of the now—the now we have created and the now we have to slowly remove ourselves from—to make this argument. Of course e-mail is good for many things; that has never been in dispute. But we need to learn to use it far more sparingly, with far less dependency, if we are to gain control of our lives.

The reduction of distances has become a strategic reality bearing incalculable economic and political consequences, since it corresponds to the negation of space.

—
P
AUL
V
IRILIO

Each new birth of reality, however deformed, can be exploited in its turn.

—
G
EORGE
W. S. T
ROW

The first parameters—the only parameters—for human existence are natural ones. Even our most dazzling cities are embedded into ecologies that scratch stealthily at the steel and brickwork, ready to reclaim the ground upon which skyscrapers and streetlamps are built. Wolves haunt Central Park at night. An empty suburban home, as it crumbles, will be taken over by thousands of living organisms that feed off its timber, dig roots into the floor joists. We are short-term leasers in this world, even if there are concrete beneath our feet and fiberglass roofs above our heads. Were humans to abandon the streets of New York City, they would collapse into the subway tunnels in just two decades.

Technology amplifies human instincts and desires, but it must obey the laws of nature if it is to sustain human life, not destroy it. And so we must remember we are part of nature, too. We may be dependent on machines, but we operate like them at our peril. A diving suit can sustain a swift ascent from 3,000 meters below sea level; the human body inside it cannot. A man who works past the point of exhaustion in a mine will collapse; a machine can keep on digging.

Technology that appears to transcend the limits of the physical world merely shifts the costs of its use elsewhere. The wheel allowed crops to be transported and sold a distance from where they were harvested; in doing so, it transformed communities, spreading them out, while also making workers travel farther than ever before in order to make a day’s wage. The automobile enabled people to live farther than ever from their loved ones and offices, and our overuse of it has polluted the skies and tarred our lungs. We may “obliterate distance,” but another part of nature always pays the price.

We are living in an age of communication revolution—using machines that far outpace human capacity, talking, writing, and typing to one another at greater speed than ever before. We can now work through the night to keep up with colleagues around the globe; we can send an e-mail from New York to Marseilles and have it arrive instantly. We enjoy relatively cheap remote, instantaneous access to our work areas, to newspapers, to stock prices from around the world. “The markets never rest,” writes the poet August Kleinzahler in “The Strange Hours That Travelers Keep.” “Always they are somewhere in agitation / Pork bellies, titanium, winter wheat.”

We are now beginning to understand the consequences of this new circumambient digital “reality.” The convenience and speed of the Internet have drawn us powerfully into a virtual
world in which distance
appears not to matter
. At the end of the day, though, we need to live in the physical world; we live in communities besides the global village; we need to sleep if we are to live healthfully; we can have five hundred virtual friends, but no matter how often we keep up with them, how many will visit our bedside when we are ill?