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

My name is Rachel Cass and on behalf of Harvard bookstore I'm delighted to welcome you to this evening's event with John Freeman who'll be speaking to us about the tyranny of email for the 4000 year journey to your inbox. Before we get started this evening I just want to take a couple of moments to mention some of ants we have coming up this fall. We still have events. Sorry we still tickets left for our event this Thursday with Barbara Ehrenreich who'll be discussing her new book Bright sided on the dangers of overly or overly optimistic culture. And she will be speaking at the Brattle Theater at 6pm on Thursday and tickets are $5 an hour on sale now. We're also looking forward to events coming up later in the month with Margaret Atwood with Christos Papademetriou who is the co-author of the new graphic novel biography of Bertrand Russell. And with Harriet reason who's a documentary screenwriter and biographer of Louisa May Alcott whose PBS documentary about Louisa May Alcott will be will be airing I think in November. For more information about any of our upcoming events please pick up an events flyer on your way out this evening or visit us online at Harbor dot com where most of our November months are up as well. 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 is the former president of the National Book Critics Circle and his work to raise awareness about the shrinking pages of book reviews in 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. So the information saturated lifestyle of today and he looks at the cultural implications of our overly connected lives. And I will officially admit that I checked my e-mail at least twice while I was writing the intro today without even thinking about it. After the talk we will have time for questions followed by a signing here 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're 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 I had my life as a writer started started in Boston I have my first job out of college was to work on a book publishing company which is contrary to many of the myths about working in publishing is probably the worst place to be 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 microphone at the time worked across the street so I would often come in here and and buy books remainer books I had no money there and while I was waiting for 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 just 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 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 have questions. Like she's 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 the member organizations and members would get in touch with me and I worked. I 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 got a coffee came back 45 minutes later and I said check this out and I had 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 imaginary 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 it something and a newspaper about the fact that the average office worker is going to send and receive 200 e-mails a day in 2009. And going to spend 40 percent of their day doing that. And to me someone has thought this is this is an enormous shift in how we communicate 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 and 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 getting end of an e-mail which is kind of nasty and it's not because we're all jerk offs it's because the 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 that when I started to write about emails I went 4000 years back in time. Because. Because what. It seems the most important thing about email is that it's it's changing our frame of reference and our 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 to bounce it back out. And what I want 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 that you know maybe e-mail is just simply a new gadget that's really convenient. And I know it's convenient and we're just we're just but ites 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's many themes which happen which which are apparent across all those things which is that there's a democratization of

words like suddenly more people are able to write and be in touch with each other. Well there is if a sort of fear factor so many people are feeling overwhelmed and ultimately there is a breakdown. And I think the big shift between. Writing a letter or sending a telegram and sending the email is 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 it is read the first section I would read as it is about the telegram and how the telegram was instrumental to the creation of simultaneous simultaneous time in 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 an 80 times and obviously now that we are on the Internet we're all living on this incredible super time zone. There are no time zones everyone's 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. I had her stretched across the continent yesterday a line of clocks extending from the extreme eastern point of Maine to the extreme western point on the Pacific coast and had each clock sounded on warm it looked 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 1893 one man stops time in New York City for nearly four minutes. The fellow thumbing the watch Springs to a halt is named James Hamlet. He was the general superintendent of the time Telegraph Company and manager of the time service of Western Union. In this capacity Hamlet was effectively Gotham's Archduke of time a role he had earned through hard work and

creativity. Hamlet had invented an electric clock that could chime in and remote location device of great use for railway stations which were required to display the time and I noticed this morning when I left New York I did not see the time anywhere in the station. Hamlet also managed Western Union's only fine on finely calibrated clock in room forty eight of its 195 on Broadway office. On that day the regulator as it was called kicked off the mammoth task of synchronizing railroad time tables. No small feat since as late as 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. Hamlet's was not as dangerous a juggling act as one might think. Even the early American rail lines were constructed to travel on a single track. A small glitch in scheduling would not send huffing Yellowstone Park flying crashing into a Northern Pacific waiting at the station telegraphic control rate of rail movements which began around eight hundred fifty five prevented such accidents before that very complicated

timetables invented by French engineer Charles why break up the rail safe. Still passenger and station agents constantly rested and wrestled with the persistent irritation railroad time was often very slightly different from local time. Even more so outside of major cities. As a result any traveller upon leaving home loses all confidence in his watch and is in fact without any sense of reliable time or Charles F. doubt and 869. If a passenger plan to travel from San Francisco to to Washington DC he would have an even more niggling problem to keep up with 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. And January 1882 Professor Cleave an 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 standardize 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's more than 2000 jewelers who in addition to peddling diamond broaches and pro 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 all together on a small scale. November 18th 1893 sounds like the Y2K of the one thousand nine hundred three. Many New Yorkers who wandered into Julie's stories that day seem to think that the hick up in their clocks would create quotas create a sense sensation a stoppage of

business and some sort of disaster the nature of which could not be exactly ascertained. Store fronts do not flog 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. But 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 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 in a little over 100 years and 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 to some of their friends. And I think one of the things about e-mail which is so destructive and actually it's a metaphysical experience has as I say about this is our sense of what is around us has changed and who is accessible to us and our boundaries of change where you check your e-mail first thing in the morning you check it at night. No one would ever receive a phone call from their from their boss at 6:30 a.m. unless it was an urgent thing. But we're willing to check an e-mail and some of those boundaries which are blurring now I think are creating the sense of chaos and and and fatigue which is so characteristic of 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 read from a chapter called This Is Your Brain on e-mail 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 email when they're answering the call of nature. Now that handheld devices give us 24/7 virtually worldwide access to email there is nowhere it would seem that people do not posses 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 Pruett 62 percent of Americans check their email 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 scheduled period during which activity as of a quarter school is suspended. Nothing those six is suspended in the wired vacation of the 21st century. Any time 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 out the BlackBerry and get some work

done says 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 and it having checked their email in bed and their pajamas in the 1996 film she's the one Jennifer Aniston is married to a distracted financier who cares more about his job than 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 and financier's. Sean Young of 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 so he never misses a message. I just realized I have a problem. Young said describing his daily routine of message consumption in an e-mail to reporter. He's not alone. Nearly half the people in AOL survey claimed 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 is 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 BlackBerrys with them 24 hours a day fully prepared to drop anything in their lives and work at a moment's notice wrote to military 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 crack berry 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. Fifty percent of Gotham ites feel they are addicted to e-mail. 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 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

probable Comet trail of anticipation. Regular delivery of the post created a daily rhythm of expectation. We know that bills in official forms will come but there might be postcards from friends christmas cards magazines or maybe more than one thousand sixty one thousand sixty seven the direct marketing firm Publishers 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 in tow. Now that our 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 1909 and by 2004 had one million users. A number that doubled ten 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 and 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 the standbys of casinos are addictive. They work on a principle called variable interval reinforcement schedule which Tom Stoppard a lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Sheffield explained it's 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 is 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 midbrain 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 playout dopamine the hormone and neurotransmitter floods the anterior cingulate the part of the brain that appears to control the mechanical functions such as heartbeat and breathing as well as rational functions such as decision making and reward anticipation. If we're performing an action it 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 e-mail we keep we need to keep clicking that send receive tabs 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 a the the addictive nature of working in this environment has been good for response rates. And one recent survey took people an average of just 1 minute and 40 seconds to respond to an email pop up alert on the computer. Seventy percent of alerts provoked a reaction in 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 eight 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 G-mail 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 too 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 email. The physiological qualities of the male depend see if they don't grow out of the psychological dimension can soon acquire one. As with any chemical dependency. If I didn't hear beep beep every time I turn on the computers that one senior citizen who adopted email in 1904 I die e-mail 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 canoe 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 and assistant professor of the Hugh Downs School of Communications and communication at SU points out that you know addicts are people who like to feel desired and needed which as a sadistic spare out a lot of us and 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 me to want much else. For these reason some psychologists are pushing to have Internet addict addiction be broadly classified as a clinical disorder. Dr Joe 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 email 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 to grant and digital Obeah 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 as a condition progresses sufferers feel increasingly isolated from society become argumentative and fall depress into depression. They spend time gaming online looking at news and pornography and emailing early sufferers Bloch says tend to be highly educated socially awkward men but now more and more there 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 you clearly have come a long way from telegrams 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 an enormously important hugely wealthy or crazy. So for the most part telegram volume was a small fraction of what e-mail volume is there's 35 trillion e-mails 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 book to throw ourselves at

the problem and to do what email makes it so hard to do which is to think just have sort of a constructive conversation and dialogue. And 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 started to really alter human existence and in 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 whether you know it or not. And the final bit is recommendations. I didn't feel like I could write a book about e-mail 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 are people who think about technology have pushed back on this problem because almost everyone I speak to works in an office is dealing with it. So I will be happy to answer any questions if anybody has anybody any and I would give a prize for the best you know anecdote. Yes. Where is this room. Yeah I think I mean I think they arise out of a desire to be connected but the machine and it and algorithms which which run Facebook ours 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 two hundred five of them were it not for Facebook.

And you know suddenly you know you're inundated with people from really bizarre in 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 this is the strange thing about Facebook and Twitter is is this is this sense that that there is no now and then everything is in the present moment. So your whole life collapses down to this. This is a single moment in 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 for them. So you know I think there are 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 I operate well on Facebook. The thing I think that doesn't operate well

as we're all meant to be broadcasters like we're all meant to be sort of media generators 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 and I think you know as with email the more tools that we have for this the harder it is going to be to to listen to one another because everyone's expecting everyone to listen to them because they're all producing all this text or you know media and that at the end of the day I think it makes it really difficult to actually have a proper conversation where you sort of not 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. Well yes I have.

I have like a it's I think all plans out of 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 you know because I is if you work in an office it's virtually impossible not to to work with e-mail. So my first recommendation is don't send. You don't have to think about an e-mail before you send it and in the 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 a response back in an awkward thing about when is this conversation over you know. So that's one of them and other things are you know I have to do this to a disc edge willing 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 is means that you spend a third of your life sleeping. A third of your life plugged in or watching a TV or playing a video game or e-mailing and then presumably another third working.

So that's I mean it seems like it's a call to 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 have spent listening to the radio or time you spent going to the movies it is 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. Yeah. Oh yeah yeah yeah

yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah oh yeah yeah yeah whatever how you feel when you get letters and you think I've got I've got two letters to respond to you lead me to what you write. We'll yeah but if you let them go if you let them slip you and you know it's a sort of guilt will kick in but now it's mania it's magnified by a factor of 20 or 50. Oh yeah well that does thing I recommend is it slowing down response rate. It is one of the examples in the book I have is HL Mencken used to get 80 letters a day and he would respond to all of them. And if you could do that and not be overwhelmed by letters because the letter you know he typed his letters to send off the mail and it would take between five to eight days to get there and then something to consider and maybe if they wanted to

respond his response they would respond but with the e-mail. 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's going up at like breakneck speed you're you never actually get to the bottom of your inbox is a horrible feeling that it's not it's not like you're a bad person it's just a machine. Yeah yeah then someone respond writes you as if you get my email and you thank God. And if you forget about someone you know forget about it's a landline. You'll see them and think you know back to my e-mail think oh oh oh yeah. Why what all. Yeah I just said yeah yeah yeah yeah

but what we're selling. Yeah yeah you know I just I try to bow out of those things but I can't. Yes why do you have it. Oh it was all right all right. Yeah I'd like to know. Oh yeah yeah yeah.

Those you can do and which I have to I 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 it's going to be one of these people you know and I just put it on our office message instead of if you need something. Here's my number call me and you can do that you're out of play and I will sort of slowly train people to call you rather than to email you if they have something. That's that's one thing that can sort of help. But you know what's really. Yeah right. You just see us constantly. What really is a particular place. Yeah. And if you're doing it yes but the thing is I think speed is the most important thing.

And when you're responding really rapidly it's very easy to just to to write something which can be misinterpreted sort of. 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 brownout There's no voice inflection there's no face. There's a you know there's no eye contact there's no speed of speaking and all these things that we have when I 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 to I 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 I do different speeds than other ones and then trying to train people into writing you letters or calling you calling you and you can even create a template it's like I'm trying to get off email. 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 say see

you know out of office messages to say please write to me. Oh you know you know oh it's right here right now you know whether you like your resume. Yeah. Yeah I know I said. I feel like a sense of place is really important and when you send a letter you have the postmark stamp that said where it came from and the return address and that the time in which the letter took to get to you in the kind of physical and intellectual or mood that it takes to

sit down. That 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 you bank online. In some cases you buy books from Amazon isn't bookstore because you know you're just you're in front of 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. You know why is there no Urban Planning to this street. Why don't we why do you know why or why this park in such disarray wise or no bookstore near me. And you know eventually that the consequences will be felt. And I think I think that's that's a serious serious concern.

Yeah you think you know me well. Then why did it end where we are you kind of matters you know like the guy I lost my cell phone about a year ago and for some back ass weird reason I couldn't get one for two weeks and I first I was really panicked I thought Geez I'm going to work. You know everyone has my phone. I have no other phone. Are they to get in touch with me. And then about a day later I started to get really happy and then I. I purposely didn't get my phone for a while because you know I was walking on streets and in New York on the Upper West Side or something. And I would notice the smell which you know isn't always 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 your gadget kind of constantly you know doing this stuff is it's not really there. Yeah I think people are actually worried now about you know me you know people say oh I don't know like you know the reason they don't hear yeah this is going to have to hearken. All right. Well I think face to face communication has always been slightly difficult because you think OK how long do I make maintain eye contact for LOOK AWAY WITH YOU KNOW. And you know do I look OK as to 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 e-mail is a great avoidance tool. But it's also you can you can say things and you know it she wouldn't say to someone in person I live in a co-op building in New York City and it's sort of worse collectively manager sounds really utopian but it's actually horrible because you know our president is a moron and you know it's 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 rip your head off over e-mail you think has it gone you know. Nice to see you and I. So I think it's also used as a as an avoidance tool and as sort of a passive aggressive tools. It allows you to kind of to 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. OH OH OH

OH OH OH OH OH OH OH OH OH YEAH. Yeah I remember the first email I sent because like all first letters it was a love letter to my girlfriend college and I just agonized over and I remember just sitting there just trying to be clever and doing all this stuff and and no no one does that anymore. To Certain agree with emails 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 I would send the funniest letters because he was working on that sort of ranch and doing really strange things and getting in all sorts of trouble. And I think emails to friends are great because that you get them in 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 just spend like 1 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 email because it's come over email that there's this kind of expectation which comes with it which is that this response will be faster because it got there hell of a lot faster. And if you took a long time writing the letter that you know 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 the mail actually travels it's touched us. 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 at our computers than 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 that it doesn't also speed up into that kind of hyper dialog that you get with friends rethink. I'm gonna write this and then you're going to write this nominee right back and it it puts your entire friendship on this hyper drive. 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 with them. Yeah so. Yeah. Oh oh the.

Sorry that the question was have I come across any email pathologies like email apnoea which he just mentioned. No is the short answer. I mean that 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 the now. I did I do the things that I did notice were not so much pathological but the ways that you now and communicating via screens conditioned how you read so email correspondence you know is you know it's messy or all off and you use less punctuation use more spaces and I think by virtue of the amount of time you 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 you my book is broken into handy chunks because I want to play to audiences. But if I was writing a novel

that's slightly problematic because you know how would you how would one Faulkner write an email you know how would James Joyce or would 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 or sort of personal thing. And then there's the essentially. Well the question was How do I see the slow communication from happening. First everyone grabs a copy of The Tyranny now and runs out the street with no underwear. Now. I think it has to be and it has to start with a kind of conversation has to have to start with it of 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 in the in the chapter you know how to manifest it for slow communication with where we are matters and I think you know people need to look around and realize that it is that email but an abuse of email and 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 do we shop in how do we spend our money. You know what do our what is our what our cities look like. And all these things I think are somehow connected. I was going to try to start a national you mail free day but then I realized there's a company in England which a publisher which has an e-mail free Friday and I'm always getting emails from the editors on that Friday everyone is cheating on me. And so I think you

know that the the short answer is I really don't know. I mean I think when I'm trying to do is put this out there and I believe and you know and viral marketing because it works. But I also believe and that the the greatest viral marketing and all the ideas and ideas have historically travelled best over time and books and that's why I you know I didn't go on a lecture circuit but rather write a book about it because I think if people read something and it changes their mind it can be really powerful because you know if if you read something that makes you think your natural instinct is to talk to other people about it. So I hope other people sort of start talking about this and by simply putting the phrase out there I think you could start a conversation. Will light their house. Stay right

there. Well. They said there was a generator but also its energy that was doing. Very. Well. Well my response to that is you know it was spent doing other things you know before we spent an hour or two emailing 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 Yeah I've been having a dinner party so there I do. I do believe there is an erosion of other activities in which email and virtual communication whether it's been on the Internet or ironing with somebody. It is it is taking the place of something else. I mean I think that there's a there's a law of thermodynamics you know it is like you can't have an engineer here. What is it. Energy that you don't you can't sort of create energy out of thin air as it comes from one place and that's I mean that's sort of my feeling about it and some of the research is is born that up as far as technology inventing anecdotes for you know 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 e-mail. You can't beg or beg or hack your way back in it's like it's all OK. And it's kind of funny that we have this thing now where we have to sort of regulate it

and my feeling is that you know what just the thing that distinguishes humans from other mammals and other animals and insects is our as our volition is our ability to make moral choices. And I don't mean to be overbought about it but I do think you know technology doesn't always mean progress. You know look at the Tomic 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 seem like progress but are actually steps away from what might be described as a more ideal way of living. So you know if if you can't sort of avail yourself of just simply of the technology and simply thinking about it is is a step in the right direction in my mind. Yeah. It's OK.

I'll get there when and when you meet him after writing letters. Is it when you when you first met after exchanging letters was it awkward or just you know without you know. Right right. Right. You know I I can't imagine what life would be like if all prisoners that if that's what you know it's wonderful. I just as a result of writing this book there's a bookseller in

San Francisco who's now started sending me letters and it's it's really what I said about friends this seems really apt because we're sort of getting to know each other very slowly over this thing which if you were on you now would it could you know it develops a momentum in a kind of you know a life of its own or sometimes doesn't feel like it's even in your own control. Well thank you for coming I really appreciate it. Thank you for coming we have copies of the book for sale to register.