The Tyranny of Email

Surprisingly enough, Andrew Keen has written a lucid and engaging review of John Freeman's new book, The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox.

Ironically, then, the most troubling of Freeman’s numbers are not our collective annual 35 trillion emails, but rather the 200 e-mails which, on average, we each receive every day. Therein lies the cause of what he calls “e-mail bankruptcy” -- “the communication subprime mortgage crisis of our era.” Instead of it being a help, these 200 daily e-mails have become a massive hindrance to both our productivity and happiness, eating up our mental attention, stealing our leisure time, wasting our intellectual focus.

So what to do? Freeman’s answer is “a manifesto for a slow communication movement” built around a very simple principle: “DON’T SEND.” Instead of mindlessly e-mailing all day, he says, we should only check our e-mail a couple of times a day; we should give what he calls “good e-mail,” which is both thoughtful and brief; we should try to replace e-mail with face-to-face meetings; and we should organize our days to include a substantial portion of “media-free time.”

Not so sure I believe that 200/day number, unless we're counting spam, which most of us never see anyway. I do get what Freeman says about emails piling up and turning into a big energy drain, but email can be (and has been, for me anyway) a big time-saver. Just like with Facebook, Twitter, what have you . . . they're all tools that can be a big waste if you do it wrong, but if you know how to use them you should get a lot out of it.

Later on in the review, this is intriguing:

Google, for example, is now working on a revolutionary new service called Wave which will collapse micro-blogging, e-mail, and collective instant-messaging into a powerfully seductive real-time messaging platform. Meanwhile, equally seductive devices like Apple’s forthcoming iTablet will continue to “liberate” us from our personal computer and provide us with convergence devices allowing us to simultaneously Twitter, telephone, instant-message, and e-mail.

This does seem to be the future of these media, with them all kind of being molded together into the same ball of clay, though I'm sure for that to happen some of them will have to be dropped from the equation, and others will be changed beyond recognition. Interesting times.