The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox at Dominant Systems Book Store

We've all experienced the tyranny of e–mail: the endless onslaught, the continual distraction, the superfluous messages clogging our inboxes. Freeman, acting editor of Granta magazine, captures viscerally the buzzing, humming megalopolis that tunes into this techno-rave of send and receive, send and receive. And he draws effectively on psychological and social research to describe the harm this tsunami of e-mail is causing: fragmenting our days, fracturing our concentration, diverting us from other sources of information and face-to-face encounters. Freeman is best when he is on point. But when he drifts into history—granted, to make the salient point that this feeling of life speeding out of control overwhelmed people with the arrival of the railroad and the telegraph (though, strangely, he omits the telephone, our e-mail enabler)—he offers more postal and telegraphic details than most people will want and hammers his main points into the ground (e.g., we need to be needed, and receiving e-mail gratifies that need). But his closing manifesto for a slow communication movement could fuel an e-mail rebellion, and his tips on how to slow down are sensible and mostly doable, except perhaps for the most hard-core e-mail addicts. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews & Comments
John Freeman's "The Tyranny of E-Mail" is a wakeup call that may be too late. In 2007 alone, "thirty-five trillion messages shot back and forth between the world's 1 billion PCs." Email is omnipresent. "We check it on the subway, we check it in the bath. We check it before bed and upon waking up." "Electronic erosion" is the replacement of tangible mail with email. Increasingly, customers pay their bills, shop, and even reveal their most intimate secrets online. So what's the problem? Isn't the convenience of instant communication and the ability to network, purchase goods, and even work from home a wonderful offshoot of our technological revolution? Freeman would argue that we are paying a big price, perhaps without realizing it, for these conveniences. Instead of freeing us up to smell the roses, electronic gadgetry is taking up more of our waking and sleeping hours. (Many people get up in the middle of the night to check their emails.) Since we have become a wired nation, people get together less frequently to have a leisurely chat. We are expected to multitask at work to such an extent that we often lose control of our time and become less proficient at thinking out complex problems. The author puts his ideas in historical context, explaining how the invention of the printing press, postal service, typewriter, and the telegraph, among other marvels, revolutionized our lives. Email, as the author points out, is far from the only culprit. Time spent surfing the net, texting, blogging, twittering, looking at YouTube, playing video games, and talking on cell phones is time that can probably be better spent thinking or relaxing. Our attention spans have decreased precipitously, we are too much in a hurry to pay attention to our friends and families, and we are surrendering a great deal of what makes us uniquely human: the ability to enjoy each moment, to concentrate on a task, develop relationships gradually, and really listen to what others are saying. In many ways, we no longer "conduct our lives mindfully, with ... deliberation and consideration." Instant communication leads to "disinhibition: impulse unleashed." When we cannot see the person with whom we're communicating, we're less likely to be thoughtful, tactful, and measured in what we say. Electronic devices can be addictive and deadening. One CEO says, "I'm tethered to my laptop as if were an oxygen machine I must cart around to keep me breathing." In addition, the electronic invasion has robbed us of privacy, opened us up to an increasing risk of identity theft and other cybercrimes, and made us prey to retailers trying to get our attention so that they can sell us an even greater number of goods. Freeman is no Luddite who expects us to turn back the clock. However, in this well-researched, intelligently written, and thought-provoking book, he suggests that we make a concerted effort to slow down, use our gadgetry more sparingly, and spend a greater portion of our days enjoying nature, getting together with friends and neighbors, reading a book (perhaps even one made out of paper), or writing a letter and sending it via snail mail. As Freeman states so eloquently, our growing dependency on electronic communication "is not a sustainable way to live. This lifestyle of being constantly 'on' causes emotional and physical burnout, workplace meltdowns, and unhappiness." It may be time to "push back against the machines and the forces that encourage us to remain connected to them."

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