Unit 72
E-mail Is Here to Stay
Is e-mail a blessing or a curse? Last month, after a week's vacation, I discovered 1,218 unread e-mail messages waiting in my inbox. I pretended to be dismayed, but secretly I was pleased. This is how we measure our wired worth in the late 1990s -- if you aren't overwhelmed by e-mail, you must be doing something wrong. Never mind that after subtracting the stale office chitchat and dumb jokes forwarded by my friends who should know better, there were 7 messages actually worth reading. I was doomed to spend half my workday just deleting junk.
E-mail. Can't live with it, can't live without it. Artists, advertisers and freedom fighters, lovers and sworn enemies -- they've all turned to e-mail as they would to any new medium of expression. E-mail is convenient, saves time, brings us closer to one another, helps us manage our ever-more-complex lives. Books are written, campaigns conducted, crimes committed -- all via e-mail. But it is also inconvenient, wastes our time, isolates us in front of our computers and introduces more complexity into our lives. To some, e-mail is just the latest chapter in the evolving his story of human communication.
Yet e-mail -- and all online communication -- is something different; it captures the essence of life at the close of the 20th century with an authority that few other products of digital technology can claim. E-mail simultaneously allows us to cope with that acceleration and contributes to it. Are our attention spans shortening under attacks of new, improved forms of stimulation? If we accept that the creation of the global-spanning Internet is one of the most important technological innovations over past 500 years, then we must give e-mail -- the living embodiment of human connection across the Net. The way we interact with people is changing; e-mail is both the catalyst and the instrument of that change.
It may even help us find those whom we want love in the first place. E-mail encourages the shy. It offers a semi-risk environment to start romance. Because it lacks the immediate threat of physical rejection, people who are shy or had painful romantic failures in the past can use the Net as a way to build a relationship in the early romantic stages. But it's not just about love. E-mail also flattens hierarchies in the bounds of an office. It's far easier to make a suggestion to your superiors and colleagues via e-mail than it is to do so in a pressure-filled meeting room. Anytime when we have something that is difficult to say, e-mail can make it easier. It serves as a buffer zone.
E-mail, ultimately, is a fragile thing, easy to forge, easy to destroy. A few weeks ago a co-worker of mine accidentally and irretrievably wiped out 1,500 of his own saved messages. For a person who conducts the bulk of his life online, such a digital tragedy is like erasing part of your own memory.
Meanwhile, now that we are all connected across time zones and corporate firewalls, we are beginning to lose sight of the difference between what is work and what is play. Six years after I logged onto CompuServe for the first time, I went to Alice Springs, a frontier town in Australia for a holiday. Instead of wandering through the desert and seeking camels, I found myself checking my mail to see if the Wired Magazine had fresh inquires for me about a story I had submitted. I was on the job -- in large part because I had an e-mail address and had made the Devil's bargain with the wired world. As I listened for the sound of the modem connecting in Alice Springs, I felt I had lost control over some valuable part of my life. Your boss will refrain from calling you at 11:30 pm, but not from sending an enquiring, must-be-answered-as-soon-as-you-log-on e-mail. E-mail doesn't just collapse distance. It demolishes all boundaries. And that can be, depending on the moment, either a blessing or a curse. |