THE TYRANNY OF E-MAIL
THE TYRANNY OF E-MAIL
The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox
By John Freeman
On a recent weekday, 126 messages made it to my e-mail in-box. 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.
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? 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.
Unfortunately, Freeman’s Chapters 1 and 2 undercut his jeremiad, which appears in Chapters 3 and 4. 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. 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.” 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.” Ultimately, e-mail is a social, cultural and literary phenomenon that demands a more nuanced approach than Freeman’s high dudgeon provides. 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. You could have the book here.
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