The tyranny of e-mail

It was when John Freeman started receiving more than 200 e-mails a day that he thought things needed to change. As one of the US’ pre-eminent literary critics, Freeman’s daily routine used to consist of going to a coffee shop in the morning to read and then returning home to write his reviews in the afternoon. But in his absence his inbox had swollen to unmanageable proportions.

“It quickly destroyed my attention span,” Freeman said. “It was absurd. A friend visited from Kansas City, and we went to get a coffee. Forty-five minutes later, we came back to my apartment and I logged on to my computer. It took about two minutes for e-mail to download, marching down the screen like some sort of advancing army.”

“I had received 72 messages in less than an hour. At that point, I just felt there was no way anyone can keep up with this biologically. It seemed shocking to me no one had written anything critical about where this sprawling messagopolis was going,” he said.

To plug the gap, Freeman wrote The Tyranny of Email, an eloquent polemic about the state of modern communication that has just been published in the US.

According to Freeman, who is the new editor of Granta magazine and a former president of the National Book Critics Circle in the US, the modern tools of communication that are meant to connect us are actually driving us further apart. Instead of bringing us into closer contact with the global community, e-mail, instant messaging, texting and social networking sites all enforce the notion of what the French philosopher Guy Debord termed “the lonely crowd.”

Freeman argues that e-mail encourages us to eschew face-to-face conversations with friends or colleagues in favor of the terse and anonymous immediacy of a computer-driven exchange.

And as the usage of digital communication has increased exponentially, our efficiency has paradoxically declined: We spend so much time checking our inboxes or refreshing our Twitter pages that, Freeman said: “Our attention spans are fractured into a thousand tiny fragments.”

We are, it seems, a society in the grip of information overload. Last year in the UK we spent 537 percent more time on Facebook than in 2007 and sent approximately 40 text messages a month. By 2011, it is estimated, there will be 3.2 billion e-mail users worldwide.

Tom Stafford, a lecturer in psychology and cognitive science at Sheffield University, said users of modern technology are often driven by the same gambler’s instinct that motivates someone to play a slot machine.

“You never know when something is going to land in your inbox, so there is that tingle of excitement every time you check,” Stafford said. “There’s something about being in the process that’s really immersive. We’re engaged while it’s happening. It looks like it is convenient, but it’s not: you are distracted for the next half hour, asking yourself if someone has answered.”

Researchers at Loughborough University found that it took an average of 64 seconds for a person to recover their train of thought after interruption by e-mail: Those who check their e-mail every five minutes waste 8.5 hours a week in this way.

“There is no doubt that people use it as an avoidance tactic,” said Yoram Kalman, a post-doctoral researcher in online communication at the Open University of Israel. “The modern office worker works for an average of three minutes before an interruption occurs.”