Slow Down, Sign Off, Tune Out

By BEN YAGODA

THE TYRANNY OF E-MAIL

The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox

By John Freeman

Illustrated. 244 pp. Scribner. $25

On a recent weekday, 126 messages made it to my e-mail in-box. Twenty-five were directed to me and me alone: 14 from friends or family, nine business-related and the other two conveying timely information about commercial accounts of mine. The rest were mass mailings or “cc’s,” including 17 messages from a Listserv, eight dispatches from news media I subscribe to, seven “Google alerts” on a subject I’m interested in, four political rants and five pieces of spam, four of them in Cyrillic characters. I had been getting this odd Cyrillic e-mail for some time, and 25 of my incoming messages on this particular day were responses to a query I had sent to my colleagues asking if Russians had been spamming them, too.

By John Freeman’s lights, that makes me a bad guy. In “The Tyranny of E-Mail,” he writes that “one of the biggest generators of excess mail is a medium-size message sent to a group of people, which then causes a pinball effect as people chime in and comment, having a virtual discussion.” And the problem is? In this case I asked a question and got helpful responses. Freeman says what I should have done is “pick up the phone.” Really? Take the time to make 50 separate calls, intruding on people who aren’t interested in this issue? (Scan and delete an e-mail message: three seconds at most, at a time of one’s choice. Conduct a telephone call with me: 30 seconds, minimum, at a time of my choice, resulting in major interruption.)

The case of the Russian spam illustrates a problem with this book. In his zeal to expose e-mail’s dark side, Freeman, the editor of Granta, ignores its good and useful features.

I am far from the proverbial power user (the “average corporate worker,” Freeman tells us, in a characteristically unsourced factoid, gets about 200 e-mail messages a day). But I have felt e-mail’s tyranny, and Freeman has some good innings on this subject. It is an instantaneous, demanding, borderline addictive medium that has insinuated its way into hitherto private spaces. (Sixty-two percent of Americans, Freeman read somewhere, write and answer work e-mail on vacation.) It is abused by spammers, identity thieves, phishers and chronic forwarders and cc-ers. It begets large-scale disinhibition, in the form of flaming and the sharing of too much information. It is hugely prone to being misinterpreted, and when correspondents have a difference of opinion, it usually makes matters worse. It creates a lot of busywork. It is responsible for the emoticon.

Unfortunately, Freeman’s Chapters 1 and 2 undercut his jeremiad, which appears in Chapters 3 and 4. In the earlier pages, he provides a short history of pre-Internet communication, from the tablet to the telegraph, and reveals that with the arrival of each new technology, people said pretty much the same thing as he is fixing to say about e-mail. A woman at the turn of the 20th century blamed the postcard craze for the fact that “there is no standard nowadays of elegant letter writing, as there used to be in our time. It is a sort of go as you please development, and the result is atrocious.” An editorial in an English newspaper in 1901, referring to the telegraph, lamented: “Our desire to outstrip Time has been fatal to more things than love. We have minimized and condensed our emotions. . . . We have destroyed the memory of yesterday with the worries of tomorrow. . . . We do not feel and enjoy; we assimilate and appropriate.” Remove the quotation marks, and the lines would fit perfectly into Freeman’s argument.

Books about social problems are often strong in describing the problem but fairly lame when it comes to suggesting solutions. The opposite is true of “The Tyranny of E-Mail.”While the diagnosis feels overblown, the prescription generally makes excellent sense. Among other things, Freeman advises us to limit how many e-mail messages we send and how often we check our in-box, to keep a written to-do list, to be careful reading and composing e-mail, and not to “debate complex or sensitive matters by e-mail.” A big 10-4 on that one.

Ultimately, e-mail is a social, cultural and literary phenomenon that demands a more nuanced approach than Freeman’s high dudgeon provides. Characteristically, he gives lip service to the medium’s convenience but says nothing about its capacity for creativity and expression. “Each correspondent we have, and each interaction with that correspondent, demands a slightly different register,” he correctly writes, and then complains that the requirement is “exhausting.” But in truth it has meant good things for the cause of writing. Every day, I get a half-dozen or more fine e-mail messages: short, (often) witty, (usually) pointed, (sometimes) thoughtful and always written in that correspondent’s particular register.

E-mail in particular and online writing in general have their well-known flaws and limitations, but they have also served as cleansing agents for prose, much as journalistic writing did early in the 20th century. That is, while they may disinhibit inappropriate declarations, they also inhibit dull, abstract wordiness.

Early in his book, Freeman writes, “No one can predict the future of a technology, and this book is certainly not going to try, but it is essential, especially when that technology has become as prevalent and pervasive as e-mail, to examine its effects and assumptions and make an attempt to understand it in a broader context.”

Maybe the best thing I can say about e-mail is that I can’t imagine anyone using it to compose such a sentence.

Ben Yagoda is a professor of English at the University of Delaware and the author of the forthcoming “Memoir: A History.” He blogs at campuscomments.wordpress.com.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/books/review/Yagoda-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3