The Tyranny of E-mail (24 page)

We pay the price when we begin to apply the rules of this virtual space to our real life, a lesson that is abundantly clear at work. The Internet was supposed to allow us to work from anywhere, and so we do—from our vacations, from our homes, from our places of worship. It was meant to liberate us from ties to a desk and office space; instead it has led us to work all the time. In the past two decades, we have witnessed one of the greatest breakdowns of the barrier between our work and personal lives since the notion of leisure time emerged in Victorian Britain as a result of the Industrial Age. And we are contributing to this breakdown piecemeal: checking our e-mail in the morning or at night, adding ever more gadgets to our tool kit of connections.

Buying into this way of life—because the Internet is now, at heart, about selling and pitching—has transformed more than just the workplace, though. It has eroded our sense of context, allowing governments and power brokers to create and manipulate a constant state of crisis, because a culture with no sense of its past is blind to the errors of history. It has put us under great physical and mental strain, altering our brain chemistry and daily needs. It has isolated us from the people with whom we live, siphoning us away from real-world places where we gather. It has placed false expectations on real-world living, making us ever more dissatisfied in spite of the huge increase in quality of life in the Western world. It has encouraged flotillas of unnecessary jabbering, making it difficult
to tell signal from noise. It has made it more difficult to read slowly and enjoy it, hastening the already declining rates of literacy. It has made it harder to listen and mean it, to be idle and not fidget.

This is not a sustainable way to live. This lifestyle of being constantly
on
causes emotional and physical burnout, workplace meltdowns, and unhappiness. How many of our most joyful memories have been created in front of a screen? Yet in 2006, it was discovered that Americans spent more than half of their life connected to various forms of media. This means we spend more time engaged in media than we do sleeping, more hours plugged in than we log at work. We work in order to have time to watch.
We spend more time with our computers than our spouses
. We check our e-mail more often than we drink water. The culture of Western media encourages us to leave a mark on this planet, to transform ourselves and become the most we can be, to project ourselves outward. Yet participating in and keeping up with these media has given birth to the most politically and culturally passive generation the world has ever seen.

If we are to step off this hurtling machine, we must reassert principles that have been lost in the blur. It is time to launch a manifesto for a
slow communication movement
, a push back against the machines and the forces that encourage us to remain connected to them. Many of the values of the Internet are social improvements—it can be a great platform for solidarity, it rewards curiosity, it enables convenience. This is not the manifesto of a Luddite, this is a human manifesto. If the technology is to be used for the betterment of human life, we must reassert that the Internet and its virtual information space is not a world unto itself but a supplement to our existing world, where the following three statements are self-evident.

We have numerous technologies that can work with extreme rapidity. But we don’t use these capabilities because they are either dangerous (even the Autobahn has begun applying speed limits, due to severe accidents) or uncomfortable (imagine turbulence at 1200 miles per hour) or would ruin the point of having the technology at all (played back faster than it was recorded, Led Zeppelin’s syrupy metal sound turns to tinsel).

The speed at which we do something—anything—changes our experience of it. Words and communication are not immune to this fundamental truth. The faster we talk and chat and type over tools such as e-mail and text messages, the more our communication will resemble traveling at great speed. Bumped and jostled, queasy from the constant ocular and muscular adjustments our body must make to keep up, we will live in a constant state of digital jet lag.

This is a disastrous development on many levels. Brain science may suggest that some decisions can be made in the blink of an eye, but not all judgments benefit from a short frame of reference. We need to protect the finite well of our attention if we care about our relationships. We need time in order to properly consider the effect of what we say upon others. We need time in order to grasp the political and professional ramifications of our typed correspondence. We need time to shape and design and filter our words so that we say exactly what we mean. Communicating at great haste hones our utterances down to instincts and impulses that until now have been held back or channeled more carefully.

Continuing in this strobe-lit techno-rave communication environment as it stands will be destructive for businesses. Employees communicating at breakneck speed make mistakes. They forget, cross boundaries that exist for a reason, make sloppy
errors, offend clients, spread rumors and gossip that would never travel through offline channels, work well past the point where their contributions are helpful, burn out and break down and then have trouble shutting down and recuperating. The churn produced by this communication lifestyle cannot be sustained. “To perfect things, speed is a unifying force,” the race-car driver Michael Schumacher has said. “To imperfect things, speed is a destructive force.” No company is perfect, nor is any individual.

It is hard not to blame us for believing otherwise, because the Internet and the global markets it facilitates have bought into a fundamental warping of the actual meaning of speed. Speed used to convey urgency; now we somehow think it means efficiency. One can even see this in the etymology of the word. The earliest recorded use of it as a verb—“to go fast”— dates back to 1300, when horses were the primary mode of moving in haste. By 1569, as the printing press was beginning to remake society, speed was being used to mean “to send forth with quickness.” By 1856, in the thick of the Industrial Revolution, when machines and mechanized production and train travel were remaking society yet again, “speed” took on another meaning. It was being used to “increase the work rate of,” as in speed up.

There is a paradox here, though. The Internet has provided us with an almost unlimited amount of information, but the speed at which it works—and we work through it—has deprived us of its benefits. We might work at a higher rate, but
this is not working
. We can store a limited amount of information in our brains and have it at our disposal at any one time. Making decisions in this communication brownout, though without complete information, we go to war hastily, go to meetings unprepared, and build relationships on the scree of false impressions. Attention is one of the most valuable modern resources. If we waste it on
frivolous communication, we will have nothing left when we really need it.

Everything we say needn’t travel at the fastest rate possible. The difference between typing an e-mail and writing a letter or memo out by hand is akin to walking on concrete versus strolling on grass. You forget how natural it feels until you do it again. Our time on this earth is limited, the world is vast, and the people we care about or need for our business life to operate will not always live and work nearby; we will always have to communicate over distance. We might as well enjoy it and preserve the space and time to do it in a way that matches the rhythms of our bodies. Continuing to work and type and write at speed, however, will make our communication environment resemble our cities. There will be concrete as far as the eye can see.

Here in the United States one can see what technology has done to rural areas. The small community of a hundred years ago, while it has not vanished, is becoming more and more rare as young people go to towns and cities, where there are work and action.

—
E
DWARD
T. H
ALL
,
Beyond Culture

The longer we work at speed over virtual forms of communication, the harder it will become to maintain real-world meeting places. Some electronic communication—political organizing, party planning, setting up meetings of any kind, browsing Google’s book archive for research—leads to interactions in the tangible here and now. All these activities must be transported to physical-world venues. But a large part of electronic communication
leads us away from the physical world. Our cafés, post offices, parks, cinemas, town centers, main streets, and community meeting halls have suffered as a result of this development. They are beginning to resemble the tidy and lonely bedroom commuter towns created by the expansion of the American interstate system. Sitting in the modern coffee shop, you don’t hear the murmur or rise and fall of conversation but the continuous, insectlike patter of typing. The disuse of real-world commons drives people back into the virtual world, causing a feedback cycle that leads to an ever-deepening isolation and neglect of the tangible commons.

This is a terrible loss. We may rely heavily on the Internet, but we cannot touch it, taste it, or experience the indescribable feeling of togetherness that one gleans from face-to-face interaction, from the reassuring sensation of being among a crowd of one’s neighbors. Seeing one another in these situations reinforces the importance of sharing resources, of working together, of balancing our own needs with those of others. Online, these values become notions that are much more easily suspended to further our own self-interest. Not surprisingly, political movements that begin online must have a real-world component; otherwise they evaporate and dissolve into the blur of other activities.

It is in the interest of large consumer businesses to continue this erosion of the physical commons, however. Storefronts are expensive; retail space can sit empty. Warehoused stock loses value and costs money. Consumers who can be redirected online are effectively helping companies do business in the cheapest way possible, in an environment where they can be pitched to and advertised to more aggressively than ever before. It is almost impossible to navigate the Web without having to stutter-step around ads and blinking messages from sponsors.

In using this tool so heavily, consumers aren’t just frying
their attention spans, they’re forfeiting one of the large sources of information that comes from face-to-face interaction and business. A butcher can tell you which cuts of meat are the freshest; an online grocer may not. That same butcher, if he is good, might not just remember your preferences—which an online retailer can do frighteningly well—but ask you how your mother has been doing, whether you caught the latest football game. These interactions remind us that we are more than consumers; they remind us that we are part of the world in a way no amount of online shopping ever will.

The Internet’s so-called global village is a consumerist dream—ultimate choice, the ability to shop for the lowest price—but, except for the rare tool that redirects back to local businesses, it erodes our ability to get the things we want locally and uses up precious resources while doing so. The Slow Food movement recognized this twenty years ago, when delegates from fifteen countries drafted a manifesto. “In the name of productivity,
Fast Life
has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes,” they wrote. In other words, we may be able to get oranges from Chile and water from Switzerland, but the carbon emissions involved in shipping them to our doorstep so we can enjoy them are destroying our environment and putting local growers and farmers out of business.

Communication works the same way. If we spend our evening online trading short messages over Facebook with friends thousands of miles away rather than going to our local pub or park with a friend, we are effectively withdrawing from the people we could turn to for solace, humor, and friendship, not to mention the places we could go to do this. We trade the complicated reality of friendship for its vacuum-packed idea. We exchange the real sensual pleasure of sharing a meal or going
for a walk—activities that sustain the tangible commons—for the disembodied excitement of being talked to or heard online. Sitting at an outdoor café and having a conversation, browsing for books with a friend in a bookstore, we cannot help but confront the physical world and help maintain its upkeep; chatting online, we can go hours without remembering we are looking into a screen.

Relying on screens, on typing at high speed, we have constructed an environment in which it is more difficult than ever to get a sense of context. We may now be able to shop around for news, but in doing so we have made it harder for one news source to bring it to us effectively. We can chat and correspond faster than ever with colleagues down the hall, but these virtual exchanges tell us far less than a phone conversation or in-person debate. We can receive love letters and licentious gossip faster than ever, but the rate at which such missives come in, followed by yet more correspondence, deprives us of the necessary mental space in which to properly frame our response.

Sitting at the center of it all, our inbox filling up by the hour, makes us feel in control, but the way it has shrunk our frame of reference leads to an ever-widening cultural passivity. We comment glibly rather than engage; there just isn’t time. We dial out of news cycles, because there will be a new story tomorrow. We check in with friends in short text messages about inane topics rather than sit down for a proper chat or withdraw to write a letter that can impart thoughts and emotions and give us a sense of our tangible selves in our handwriting, in our choice of stamp, that even the most elegantly composed e-mail will lack.

We need context in order to live, and if the environment
of electronic communication has stopped providing it, we shouldn’t search online for a solution but turn back to the real world and slow down. To do this, we need to uncouple our idea of progress from speed, separate the idea of speed from efficiency, pause and step back enough to realize that efficiency may be good for business and governments but does not always lead to mindfulness and sustainable, rewarding relationships. We are here for a short time on this planet, and reacting to demands on our time by simply speeding up has canceled out many of the benefits of the Internet, which is one of the most fabulous technological inventions ever conceived. We are connected, yes, but we were before, only by gossamer threads that worked more slowly. Slow communication will preserve these threads and our ability to sensibly choose to use faster modes when necessary. It will also preserve our sanity, our families, our relationships, and our ability to find happiness in a world where, in spite of the Internet, saying what we mean is as hard as it ever was. It starts with a simple instruction: Don’t send.