Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox

And now it's my pleasure to welcome to the store John Freeman John is a book critic whose work has appeared in over 100 publications over the years. He's the former president of the National Book Critics Circle and has worked to raise awareness about the shrinking pages of book reviews and newspapers and magazines across the country. And since May he has served as acting editor of Granta magazine. And as of yesterday he was permanently appointed to that position. Congratulations. John's new book is the tyranny of e-mail. A look at the ubiquitous pernicious attention sucking power of our inbox. In it he explores the history of our written correspondence from a time when it was much slower and more thoughtful. The information saturated lifestyle today and he looks at the cultural implications of our overly connected lives. And I will officially admit that I check my email at least twice while I was writing my intro today without even thinking about it. After the talk we will have time for questions followed by a signing at the front. As always I'd like to thank anyone who purchases a copy of the book here this evening. By doing so you are helping to support both a local independent bookstore and this author series.

And now please join me in welcoming John Freeman. It's really nice to be here in part because my my life as a writer. I started in Boston. My first job out of college was to work in a book publishing company which is contrary to many of the myths about working in publishing is probably the worst place to live as a writer so I quit my job and moved to Boston without a job and was temping at Putnam Investments and started to write book reviews for The Boston Phoenix and my girlfriend at the time worked across the street so I would often come in here and go and buy books remaindered books. I had no money while I was waiting for it to get out of work and it's just really nice to actually be back in this store because it's giving me so much reading pleasure for such a small amount of money. Over the years so and what she said about supporting the store is I think true because it's part of what I'm writing about is the loss of public space and the retreat into virtual worlds. We can do so much online now that it's easy to just simply

ignore the public comments and what's in front of us and we can see what happens when a big box retail chain store comes to our neighborhood and what happens to Main Street what happens when we ignore what's in front of us. So I thought I'd just talk a little bit about why I wrote this book because most budding writers don't set out to write the great American book on email but I found myself compelled to do it. And then I maybe read a little bit and then talk and then read and then I'll have questions like she mentioned I was working for the National Book Critics Circle about four or five years ago. And I was getting two or three hundred emails a day and I thought that was just me that I was simply part of a member organization and members would get in touch with me and I worked my syndicated my reviews to different newspapers. So I was in touch with a lot of people and I a writer friend came to visit me and we went out and got a coffee and came back 45 minutes later and I said check this out. And I logged on to my e-mail and within 45 minutes 72 e-mails had come in

and it took a minute and a half for this sort of Maginot line of e-mails to march down my screen. And it was at that point I realized that there was something wrong with my existence. And shortly after that I read something in a newspaper about the fact that the average office worker is going to send and receive 200 e-mails a day in 2009 and they're going to spend 40 percent of their day doing that. And to me I just thought this is this is an enormous shift in how we communicate and have all these things that we used to do in person. We're doing virtually over e-mail and with text and it's changing our lives not just simply how we work but how we think and how our attention span is structured and how easy it is to read at the end of the day and how we communicate and what we actually say to people over this medium. I mean a lot of everyone has been on the receiving and sometimes giving end of an e-mail which is kind of nasty and it's not because we're all jerk offs it's because this communication medium in which we're working encourages the kind of disinhibition. So I decided I would take a look at this

and what weirdly happened to me was when I started to write about email. I went 4000 years back in time because. Because what it seems the most important thing about e-mail is that it's it's changing our frame of reference frame of context to a very small aperture which is ourselves and which is the time it takes for an email to come to come into our inbox and into bounce back out. And what I wanted to do is explode that context and look at what has happened with written communication over time and how we communicate and how words travel over a distance and maybe there really isn't a big deal on email. Maybe email is just simply a new gadget that's really convenient. And I know it's convenient and we're just we're just Luddites or we're not we're we haven't adapted yet. And what I found is when you look at the history of the postal service when you look at the creation of the telegram when you look at the early creation of the Internet there there's many themes which happen which which are apparent across all those things which is that there's a democratization of words. Suddenly more people are able to write

and be in touch with each other. Well there is a sort of fear factor suddenly people are feeling overwhelmed. And ultimately there's a breakdown. And I think the big shift between writing a letter or sending a telegram and sending an email is it's simply the speed and we're trying to keep up with the machine now which is so much faster at patching and sorting things and we are and biologically we can't keep up. So what I thought I do is read the first section I would read is is is about the telegram and how the telegram was instrumental to the creation of simultaneous simultaneous time and America for the telegram there are 180 time zones in America. So if you wanted to travel across the country from Boston to San Francisco you would have to change your watch on Navy Times and obviously now that we're all on the Internet we're all living on this incredible super time zone. There are no time zones. Everyone is accessible at all times. And so I'll just

read this little bit. It's called The Invention of now and it starts with a quote from The New York Times from 1883 which I spent a lot of time reading old newspapers which is a hoot. If you have time had there stretched across the continent yesterday a line of clocks extending from an extreme eastern point of Maine to the extreme western point on the Pacific coast and had each clock sounded alarm at. Look at at our noon local time there would have been a continuous ringing from the east to the west lasting for three and a quarter hours. At noon today there will undoubtedly be confusion on November 18th 1883 one man stopped time in New York City for nearly four minutes. The fellow thumbing the watch Springs to a halt is named James Hamlett. He was the general superintendent of the time Telegraph Company and manager of the times service of Western Union. In this capacity Hamlet was effectively Gotham's Archduke of time the role he had earned through hard work and creativity. Hamlet had invented an electric clock that could chime in and remote

location devices great used for railway stations which were required to display the time. I noticed this morning when I left New York. I did not see the time anywhere in Penn Station. Hamlin also managed Western Union's only Fine own finally calibrated clock and room 48 of its 195 Broadway office on that day. The regulator as it was called kicked off the mammoth task of synchronizing railroad timetables. No small feat since his latest 1882 American roads had a blizzard of time standards and therefore possessed more than 70 different answers to one very simple question. What time is it hemlocks was not as dangerous a juggling act as one might think. Even though early American rail lines were constructed to travel on a single track a small glitch in scheduling would not send a huffing yellow. You also don't park line crashing into a Northern Pacific waiting at the station telegraphic control or of rail movements which began around 1855 prevented such accidents before that very complicated timetables invented by French engineer Charles Wybert kept the rail safe. Still

passenger and station agents constantly wrestle wrestled with a persistent irritation railroad time was often very slightly different from local time even more so outside of major cities. As a result any traveler upon leaving home loses all confidence in his watch and is in fact without any sense of reliable time. Or Charles left out in 1869. If a passenger planned to travel from San Francisco to Washington DC he would have an even more niggling problem to keep up for the local time. He would have to change his watch more than 200 times along the way in the middle of the 19th century the converging needs of geophysicists for uniformity of observations and railroads led to a syncopated haphazard but effective push to fix the situation. In January 1882 Professor Cleavon Abbey at a meeting of the New York electrical society proposed three standard times. Philadelphia time for Atlantic coast St. Louis time for the Mississippi Valley and San Francisco time for the Pacific coast in October 1882 the heads of all the major railroads met in Chicago where they agreed to work together to create standardized time.

A year later at precisely 9 a.m. in New York Hamlet stopped the regulator for three minutes and 58 seconds so that he could standardize time to a reading taken from a nearby observatory and then restarted the machine creating a new. 9 a.m. sharp three observatories in Washington D.C. Cambridge Massachusetts Allegheny Pennsylvania then tested its accuracy by telegraph. Finally at noon a ball dropped from the top of the Western Union Building which triggered a telegram to be sent to the city. More than 2000 jewelers who in addition to peddling diamond broaches and Pearl chokers sold time itself. It is here at the jewelers that we get a fascinating window into the metaphysical vertigo that overcomes us when the space time continuum continuum is disrupted sped up or stopped altogether on a small scale. November 18th 1883 sounds like the Y2K of the 19th century. Many New Yorkers who wandered into jewelry stores that day seemed to think that the hiccup in their clocks would create quota's create a sense sensation a stoppage of business and some sort of disaster of that nature which could

not be exactly ascertained. Storefronts did not flood duct tape or bottled water but a similar letdown descended upon the befuddled when the fateful hour passed without catastrophe. They were incredulous when informed that the change would probably be one which they would know nothing about. At the time a New York Times reporter in a story entitled time's backward flight and would not necessarily postpone the celebration of evacuation day for a week shipmaster is arguably faced a more practical problem. They would have to figure out how to coordinate their position in this new linked scheme. When sailing about out of reach of time balls so I thought I'd read that just as a sort of tiny glimpse into just how far we've traveled and a little over 100 years into in terms of how many people we felt connected to and how what kind of space we all shared simultaneously because before this moment there was no sense of simultaneity. If someone was in another city they were unreachable. They were almost in another world. And if you go further back with the history of the letter it's even more remote letters were treasured and passed around. No one would

photocopy a letter. They would simply read it aloud. Some of their friends. And I think one of the things about email which is so disruptive and actually it's a metaphysical experience as I would say about this is our sense of what is around us has changed and who is accessible to us and our boundaries have changed. We check your email first thing in the morning we check it at night. No one would ever receive a phone call from their boss at 6:30 a.m. unless it was an urgent thing. But we're willing to check in e-mail and some of those boundaries which are blurring now I think are creating the sense of chaos and fatigue which is so characteristic of the tyranny of e-mail. So I thought I'd jump ahead a little bit to our present day and maybe do a little contrast from life in 1883 to now. And I've read from a chapter called This Is Your Brain on email and it also starts with a quote.

It says if the medium is the message what does that say about new survey results that found nearly 60 percent of respondents check their e-mail when they're answering the call of nature. Well now that hand-held devices give us 24/7 virtually worldwide access to e-mail there is nowhere it would seem that people do not pause to check it. We log on during the drive to work download a few messages on the train ride home. We look at it in the bath and in between sermons at church 60 bruit 62 percent of Americans check their e-mail on vacation and respond to work queries at a time when they're supposed to be relaxing. According to the Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary vacation means a respite or time of respite from something or a schedule period during which activity as of court or school is suspended. Nothing though is suspended in the wired vacation of the 21st century. Anytime there's a moment of silence a break between moment email insinuates itself with stunning regularity. You know those pregnant pauses you have on elevators. That's a great time to pull up the BlackBerry and get some work

done. Raul Fernandez the CEO of dimension data. There's no downtime anymore even at bedtime. Sixty seven percent of the 4000 people aged 13 and over surveyed in AOL's 2008 e-mail addiction poll admitted to having checked their e-mail in bed in their pajamas in the 1996 film she's the one. Jennifer Aniston is married to a distracted financier who cares more about his job and his wife. We know this because he takes his laptop to bed. Now many of us are doing the same even if our devices have shrunk along with our trust in financier's. Sean Young a Phoenix is one. He logs on before and after the gym by the pool in the car and even leaves his handheld inches from his face at night. He never misses a message. I just realized I have a problem. Young said describing his daily routine of message consumption in an email to a reporter he's not alone. Nearly half the people in AOL survey claim that they were addicted to e-mail. The technology that was supposed to set us free from work anywhere to check in and clock out on our own time has now become the longest employee leash ever

invented because we can't seem to log off. We haven't just tried to merge with this machine to marry the damn thing. It has become our iron lung. I have friends and relatives that carry their blackberries with them 24 hours a day fully prepared to drop anything in their lives and work at a moment's notice. Wrote Tim O'Leary the CEO of a marketing firm. I'm tethered to my laptop as if it were an oxygen machine I must cart around to keep me breathing. The word Cranbury was Webster's dictionary word of the year in 2006. The most addictive metropolis in America is of course not surprisingly New York City. The City That Never Sleeps and apparently never stops clicking 50 percent of Gotham gets filled. They are addicted to email. Lunch hour in Manhattan can sometimes feel like an outtake from a strange daylight zombie film. Email drones flicking and scrolling through their handhelds checking emails that they should should and could just easily read 20 minutes later at their desk or are given a wide berth on a city street by the not yet addicted. There are several reasons for this burgeoning obsession. Mail has always traveled to us with a small but palpable comment

trail of anticipation. Regular delivery of the post created a daily rhythm of expectation. We know that bills and official forms will come but there might be postcards from friends Christmas cards magazines or maybe more. In 1960 1967 the direct marketing firm publisher's clearinghouse launched a prize giveaway. It might not just be your subscription to Runner's World in your mailbox. It might also be a one million dollar check for the prize patrol and so now that her inboxes have become both our most used mailbox and virtual doorstep it's hard not to have the same complicated mixture of good and bad expectations when checking email. Except that we no longer have to wait. The BlackBerry was introduced in 1999 and by 2004 had 1 million users a number that doubled. 10 months later as of June 2009 that number had reached twenty eight point five million worldwide and that doesn't even count the people using e-mail enabled cellular phones. Millions upon millions of people the world over can now do constantly check their email. Psychologists have discovered that the behavior in doing so is very like that of people sitting before a slot machine

neurologist now understand why these standbys of casinos are addictive. They work on a principle called variable interval reinforcement schedule which Tom Stopford a lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Sheffield explained has been established as a way to train the strongest habits. This means that rather than reward every action every time it is performed you reward it sometimes but not in a predictable way. So with email usually when I get it there is nothing interesting. But every so often there's something wonderful and invite. Or maybe some juicy gossip and I get a reward. There are chemical reasons for why this reward feels so good. Reasons. Reasons that go far beyond the quality or the rarity of the gossip. The mid-brain is constantly trying to make predictions about when we will and won't be rewarded. Brain Imaging is beginning to show that when we get a big reward such as a jackpot play out dopamine the hormone and neurotransmitter floods the anterior cingulate the part of the brain that appears to control the mechanical function such as heartbeat and breathing as well as rational functions such as decision making and reward anticipation. If we're performing an action that doesn't

always pay out but does some of the time such as playing the slots the lesson learned is that if we want to reward we need to keep pulling that lever and so it is with our email we keep we need to keep clicking that send receive tab even when our computer is set to automatically check email every 90 seconds to get the reward. We've come to expect will arrive sooner or later someone is thinking of me. The addiction that the addictive nature of working in this environment has been good for response rates in one recent survey it took people an average of just one minute and 40 seconds to respond to an email pop up alert on the computer. Seventy percent of alerts provoked a reaction and just seven seconds. As with any device it's a disaster when you take e-mail away even if only for a few hours. When the BlackBerry network went down for several hours one night and into the next day in 2007 it deprived 8 million users of their wireless e-mail. Many of them panicked. My blood ran cold said one real estate consultant who was traveling on business. I was off line and the summer of 2008 Google's popular Gmail service went down for just a few hours and the company was

flooded with responses. We feel your pain and we're sorry. The company wrote on its blog going off line causes huge amounts of stress for companies to especially small ones. A survey done in England revealed that 77 percent of office workers and company owners agree that e-mail downtime causes major stress at work. Forty percent responded with agitated mouse clicking 10 percent physically assaulted their computers. Postcards may have been a craze but there's nothing that even compares to this level of devotion to e-mail. The physiological qualities of email dependency if they don't grow out of a psychological dimension can soon acquire one. As with any chemical dependency I didn't hear a beep beep every time I turn on the computer said one senior citizen who adopted email in 1994. I die email has become a way to be reminded that we exist in a world overloaded with connections that we are needed out of the Internet. We have constructed a new communication environment that enables us to constantly feed that need to be plugged in surrounded by links to all

of our friends and colleagues. Arterial Ramirez an assistant professor of the Hugh Downs School of Communications at communication at SU points out that e-mail addicts are people who like to feel desired and needed which as the statistics bear out is a lot of us. It makes us feel as part of a community or network. Ramirez says it's a basic human desire that the way that email has speeded it up has destroyed our ability to want much else. For these reasons some psychologists are pushing to have Internet addiction to be broadly classified as a clinical disorder. Dr. Jerald Block of the Oregon Health and Science University is one of them and he says that sufferers show all the classic signs of addiction. They forget to eat and sleep. They require more advanced technology and higher doses. In this case a larger volume of e-mail a constant connection to it to get their fix. But they're in for perpetual disappointment. When we log into our e-mail server writes Richard the Grand Prix and digit topia the expectation of finding new mail negates any possible excitement or surprise if there's no mail. We're disappointed.

So we check it more and more. And as a condition progresses sufferers feel increasingly isolated from society become argumentative and fall into depression. They spend time gaming online looking at news and pornography and e-mailing. Early sufferers Bloch says tend to be highly educated socially awkward men but now more and more they are middle aged women who are either at home alone or working. In fact there's no better place for an Internet addict these days than at work. So clearly you've come a long way from telegram's which we have to remind ourselves were never sent directly to people. They were sent and printed out and walked to somebody almost nobody had a telegram office in their apartment unless they were enormously important hugely wealthy or crazy. So for the most part telegram volume was of a small fraction of what email volume is. There's thirty five trillion emails bouncing around this year and it's going to keep going up. And I just thought the best way to deal with this is actually to try to to throw ourselves at

the problem and to do what email makes it so hard to do. Just think we just have sort of a constructive conversation and a dialogue. I noticed that the other Harvard bookstore event tonight is called connected. And it's all about new media and its possibilities. And I'm not saying in this book that there are not possibilities and potential and wonderful things about email but what I'm trying to point out is that it's starting to really alter human existence and ways which I think are quite damaging. And so I end the book with a manifesto for a slow communication movement. So you are political activists right now. You know it or not. And the final bit is recommendations. I didn't feel like I could write a book about email without actually giving some advice. And so I'm not a guru on this. I don't have a marketing or technology background but I did feel like it's sort of it's better that someone outside of technology comes to this because I've been kind of shocked at how little

technology writers or people who think about technology have pushed back on this problem because almost everyone I speak to who works in an office is dealing with it. So I would be happy to answer any questions if anybody has anybody any. And I would give a prize for the best anecdote. Yeah I think I mean I think they arise out of a desire to be connected but the machine and the algorithms which run Facebook are so far advanced beyond our desire that we end up doing things we wouldn't end up doing. So you know I had a good time in high school and I like people I went to high school with but I don't think I would be in touch with 200 five of them were it not for Facebook. And you know suddenly you know you're inundated with people from really bizarre and various parts of your life and if you go on to Facebook which I did as I was writing this book I didn't feel like I could write this book and not

experience what it's like. And the strange thing about Facebook and Twitter is is it is this sense that that there is no now and then everything is in a present moment. So your whole life collapses down to this single moment and everybody who's ever been in your life is in touch with you or can be quite easily. And I treat Facebook now sort of like an extra inbox which I don't need because I already have four of them. So you know I think there's some wonderful things about Facebook it's really good. I mean I work for this magazine Granta and we have events. We had one here and it's great to sort of organized groups if you want to say here's a here's a party invite for you know anyone who's in Boston sort of group activities I think operate well on Facebook. The thing I think that doesn't operate well is we're all meant to be broadcasters like we're not all meant to be sort of media generator's broadcasting our experiences and you know it's media representation whether it's you know pictures of our vacation or you know videos that we make or sort of

video responses to a movie but now we all have that capability. I think you know as with e-mail the more tools that we have for this the harder it is going to be to listen to one another because everyone is expecting everyone to listen to them because they're all producing all this text or you know media. And at the end of the day I think it makes it really difficult to actually have a proper conversation where you sort of you know just waiting to talk. You're sort of listening to somebody and responding to them rather than sort of moving on on your own tangible. I have. I think all plans have to have 10 steps. So I think look there's like 10 things which helped me because I was getting a lot of you know I still do and I still struggle with it because I know if you work in an office it's virtually impossible not to to work with email. So my first recommendation is don't send you don't you know think about an e-mail before you send it. And in many cases you don't have to send it. And so if you don't send an e-mail that person doesn't get the e-mail you don't get their response e-mail then you don't have the response to the response and the response

back and then awkward thing about when is this conversation over. So that's one of them and other things are you know I have to do is to add to scheduling media free time in your house. I came across this extraordinary statistic which is that Americans now spend a third of their lives ingesting or engaged in media which just means that you spend a third of your life sleeping a third of your life plugged in or watching a TV or playing a videogame or e-mailing and then presumably another third working. So that to me it seems like a call to step away from media. And one of the other statistics which I pulled up in my research which I found alarming was a Stanford University study which said that you know 90 percent of people who use Internet are using it for e-mail and they say they're spending two plus hours a day doing this. This is outside of work and that time doesn't come out of TV time

or time you would've spent listening to the radio or time spent going to the movies. It's just additional time. So basically this technology which is supposed to sort of connect us is isolating us from people who are in front of us. So those are just two of the recommendations. The other thing I recommend is it slowing down response rate be one of the examples in the book I have is H.L. Mencken. You get 80 letters a day and you respond to all of them. And he could do that and not be overwhelmed by letters because the letter you know he'd typed his letters said send it off the mail and it would take between five to eight days to get there and then someone to consider and maybe if they wanted to respond his response they would respond. But with email if you try to respond right away someone responds right away. And so the volume will never actually go down. If you sort of try to do it quickly. So one of the things I do is put things in draft just simply to slow it down because you know if if everything is going at like breakneck speed you never

actually get to the bottom of your inbox there's a horrible feeling. It's not it's not you're a bad person it's just the machine. Yeah. Yeah then someone writes The answer is did you get my email and you think. And if you forget about some of you know forget about it's like a landline you see them and think back to my e-mail. Yeah those things you can do and which I have to did what I did today because I didn't I don't have a BlackBerry but I don't have it engaged so I have e-mail on it here because otherwise I'd be one of these people you know and I just put out of office message and said if you need something here's my number call me and you can do that periodically and I will slowly train people to call you rather than to e-mail you if they have something. And that's that's one thing that can sort of help. But the thing I think speed is the most important thing and when you're responding really rapidly you hit it just to write something which can be misinterpreted. And 50 percent of

e-mails the tone is misinterpreted. And so you have to sort of step back and write something very carefully and even then because of that communication out there's no voice inflection there's no face there's no there's no eye contact there's no speed of speaking. I mean all these things that we have when we talk to somebody that you can use to sort of convey what you mean without you know beyond the words are gone. And so it's just it's very difficult to do. I mean there is no real solution to that other than sort of slowing down which is that you know responding to some messages you know at a different speed and other ones and then trying to train people into writing you letters or calling and calling in and you can even create a template. It's like I'm trying to get off the e-mail. You know if you're and you can just get give people your address because I get those things all the time from people and I totally sympathize with it. When I see you know I'm out of office messages to say please write to me. Yeah I know. I feel like a sense of place is really important and when

you send a letter you'd have a postmark stamp that said where it came from and the return address and the time which the letter took to get to you and the kind of physical and intellectual or move that it takes to sit down. And the speed at which your hand moves which I think is probably one of the best ways to can convey a sense of thinking and deep thinking. And one of my feelings about e-mail and just sort of virtual internet communication and the Internet in general is that it's causing us to pull back from what's in front of us and communities. You know you don't go to your post office you do it online. You don't bank you don't go to your bank your bank or mine. In some cases you buy books from Amazon rather than a bookstore because you know you're just you're in the computer anyway you might as well do it. But there are consequences to this which means that you know you can raise your head and think how did how did America get so ugly. You know like why is this why is the street no wiser no urban planning to the street. Why. Why do you

know why or why is this park in such disarray Why is there no bookstore near me. And you know eventually the consequences will be felt. And I think that's that's a serious serious concern. Well what's and where we are kind of matter is you know like I I lost my cell phone about a year ago and for some reason I couldn't get one for two weeks. And at first I was really panicked I thought gee I'm going to work. You know everyone has my phone I have no phone. How are they to get in touch with me. And then about a day later I started to get really happy. Then I I purposely didn't get my phone for a while because you know I was walking down streets and New York on the Upper West Side or something and I would notice the smell which you know isn't all that pleasant in New York. You know I just felt like I was in the sensory world for the first time in a long time. And my thoughts had a much slower rhythm and I just felt like I was

aware in a way that you know if you're walking around with your gadget kind of constantly you know doing this stuff is it's not really there. Well I think face to face communication has always been slightly difficult because you think OK how do I make maintain eye contact before I look away with you know and you know do I look OK. Is does my breath smell. You know do they like me. There's all these sorts of clusters of anxiety that are you know associated with talking to somebody face to face. And so for all those reasons email is a great avoidance tool but it's also you can you can say things in email. She wouldn't say to someone in person and I live in a co-op building in New York City and it sort of collectively manage with sounds really utopian but it's actually horrible because you know our president is a moron and you know this other guy is kind of you know always siding with this guy and there's all these sort of e-mail wars that happen all the time and it's the funniest thing when you get in the elevator with someone who's just you know ripped your head off over e-mail anything has gone you know. Nice to see you.

And so I think it's also used as an avoidance tool and a sort of passive aggressive tool allows you to kind of bully in ways that you would you would never do in person and actually are kind of pointless to do because eventually it all comes back. I remember the first email I sent because like all first letters it was a love letter to my girlfriend in college and I just agonized over it. I remember just sitting there just trying to be clever and doing all this stuff and and now you know no one does that anymore. To a certain agree with e-mails unless are you know willing somebody or they're writing to a friend. And I treasure the letters I got in college because one of my friends lives in Idaho and we send the funniest letters because he was working on a sort of ranch and doing really strange things and getting all sorts of trouble. And I think emails to friends are great because you get them immediately. You don't have to go to the post office. You don't you can reply right away you can send them from anywhere. You don't have to figure out funny postage if you're in a foreign city

and you can spend like one euro to get onto an internet computer. But I think there's something really lost in that because again with friends you write someone a really long e-mail because it's come over e-mail that there's this kind of expectation which comes with it which is that this response will be faster because it got there a hell of a lot faster and it took a long time writing the e-mail. You know you kind of want someone to sort of take it in and respond to it in kind. And I just feel like people if they're going to do that kind of thing should really just write a letter because there's still things missing from sending an e-mail between friends which is you know your handwriting and the sort of fleshly envelope in which mail actually travels it's touched you. It's like an extension of you. And it's been living you know if you're writing on paper that was once part of a tree and there's something extremely different about you know touching something that was once organic and living to looking at a screen. And we spend already

so much time you know we spend more time on our computers then we do with our spouses. And so this is like this is a marriage. It's not working. You know I think and so I think it's probably better to sit down and write a letter even if your hand cramps and mail it because you know it doesn't. Also speed up into that kind of hyper dialogue you get with friends where you think oh my god I'm gonna write this and then you're going to write this nominee right back into it. It puts your entire friendship on this hyperdrive like I'm on steroids and eventually it comes to a conclusion probably faster than it would ever if you using these other ways to communicate them. Oh sorry. The question was have I come across any e-mail pathologies like e-mail apnea which he just mentioned. No it is a short answer. I mean the the things that I came across were general addiction. You know of checking it far more than it needs to be checked and checking out for probably chemical and biological reasons rather than reasons for needing to check. Now

I did the things that I did notice were not so much pathological but the ways that e-mail and communicating screens conditioned how he read. So email correspondence you know is you know it's mesir often use less punctuation use more spaces. And I think by virtue of the amount of time we spend reading it it means that we read differently. We expect bullet points shorter paragraphs more spaces between the paragraphs. And personally I think that's changing the way we read. You know if my book is broken into handy chunks because I want to play to audiences. But how does writing a novel that's finally problematic because you know how would you how would William Faulkner write an email you know how would James Joyce or or Thomas Bernhard write an email. You know there's some writers in there some thoughts which are developed over long paragraphs that can't be broken down and simplified.

So to me that's that's more of a cultural pathology rather than a sort of biological or a sort of personal thing. The question was How do I see the slow communication been happening. First everyone grabs a copy of the Tierney email and runs out in the street with Nandu. I think it has to be it has to start with the kind of conversation has to it has to start with recognizing a moment of recognition about certain principles that are being degraded or altered by the way we're living and one of them is that context and space matters. And you know I have this and that and the chapter you know manifests for slow communication is where we are matters and I think you know people need to look around and realize that that e-mail and the abusive e-mail and the abuse of the Internet is not just a technological

thing. It's not just a social media thing it's not just about work. It's really connected to a larger group of things which are happening in our lives which is where the hell's our food come from. You know what stores to shop and how do we spend our money. You know what you are. What does our what are our cities look like. And all these things I think are somehow connected. I was going to try to start a national e-mail free day but then I realized there was a company in England which a publisher which has an email free Friday and I'm always getting emails from the editors on that Friday everyone is cheating on. And so you know the short answer is I really don't know. I mean I think what I'm trying to do is put this out there and I believe and you know in viral marketing because it works. But I also believe that the the greatest viral marketing at all is ideas and ideas have historically traveled best over time and books. And that's why you know I didn't go on a lecture circuit but rather

write a book about it because I think if people read something in it and it changes their mind it can be really powerful because you know if you read something that makes you think your natural instinct is to talk to other people about it. So I hope other people start talking about this. And by simply putting the phrase out there I think it could start a conversation. Well my my response to that is you know it was spent doing other things you know before we spent an hour or two e-mailing every night we were doing something else which is possibly talking to our spouse or you know playing with our kids or you know going to a soccer game or having having a dinner party. So I do I do believe there is an erosion of other activities in which e-mail and virtual communication whether it's being on the Internet or IMing with somebody. It is it is taking the place of something else. I mean I think there is a what is that

law of thermodynamics. You know if you can't have an engineer here what is energy. And you know you can't sort of create energy out of thin air. It comes from one place. And that's I mean that's sort of my feeling about it and some of the research has borne that up as far as technology inventing antidotes for email. There is actually something called freedom which allows you to regulate your use of the Internet on your computer so you can lock yourself out of email and you can't beg your bag or hack your way back in it's like it's all. And it's kind of funny that we have this thing now where we have to sort of regulated. And my feeling is that you know what this the thing that distinguishes humans from other mammals and other animals and insects is our is our volition is our ability to make moral choices. And I don't mean to be overblown about it but I do think you know technology doesn't always mean progress. You know look at the atomic bomb. Look at the automobile. You know look at what the interstate the creation interstate has done to most of our landscapes

not just in America but around the world. There are things which are which seemed like progress but are actually steps away from what might be described as a more ideal way of living. So you know if you can't sort of avail yourself of just simply of the technology then simply thinking about it is a step in the right direction in my mind. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

And when you meet him after writing letters is it when you when you first met after exchanging letters. Was it awkward or Without You. You know. I can't imagine what life would be like if all prisoners at all. That's you know it's wonderful I just as a result of writing this book there's a bookseller in San Francisco who has now started sending me letters. And it's it's really said about friends is it seems really apt because we're sort of getting to know each other very slowly over this thing which if we were on e-mail it could develop

some momentum and a kind of a life of its own which sometimes doesn't feel like it's even in your own control. Well thank you for coming I really appreciate it.