Tyrannical Email

All right, confess. Do you feel nervous and anxious if you haven’t checked your e-mail in the past five minutes? Do you experience a thrill when you see you have new messages waiting, or a pang of disappointment when there’s nothing new? Do you put your iPhone or Blackberry under the pillow and check it for messages last thing at night and first thing in the morning?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, don’t be ashamed. You’re not alone. According to author and editor John Freeman, many of us are addicted to e-mail. In his new book, The Tyranny of E-Mail, he confesses:

“Six months before beginning this book, I was receiving two to three hundred messages a day. I would log on in the morning and watch new e-mail march down my Outlook screen with a small bubble of joy -- I was needed! -- and a mountain of dread: if I didn’t respond to these messages, I would offend people, miss out on some key piece of business, add to the ever-increasing backlog of messages that was growing like a mulch pile in leaf season.”

The Tyranny of E-Mail provides a wealth of fascinating and frightening statistics about the e-mail deluge:

• 35 trillion e-mail messages were sent in 2007
• 300 million messages are sent every minute
• the average corporate worker in the United States spends 40% of their workday sending and receiving an average 200 e-mails
• 62 percent of Americans check their e-mail on vacation
• 67 percent of them say they’ve checked their e-mail in bed

(On a local note, Freeman says that in 1986, 1,500 students and faculty at Simon Fraser University were using e-mail, sending between 10,000 and 20,000 messages each month. Twenty years later, there were more than 40,000 e-mail accounts at SFU, and users were sending 10 million e-mails per month, a 14,000 percent increase.)

Eye-catching, out-of-context statistics aside, Freeman makes some valid points about e-mail in his book. We wake up, download our e-mails, and we then let those e-mails determine our day for us. We’re not in charge of our lives anymore -- the e-mails we receive have taken over.

How valid is Freeman’s argument? Andrew Feenberg teaches at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication. A renowned scholar in the field of philosophy of technology, he agrees that e-mail sometimes does get overwhelming -- “I think I’m on the receiving end of those 10 million SFU e-mails each month,” he jokes. He says that e-mail makes us more efficient -- “I can maintain correspondence with people all over the world, and I don’t have to label envelopes and buy stamps. Also the formalities aren’t required -- you don’t even have to say ‘dear so-and-so’ anymore.” But at the same time, e-mail exhibits a paradoxical effect in that “the number of people you can be in touch with has multiplied far faster than the gains in efficiency that email makes possible.”

It’s difficult to get off the e-mail treadmill, even if we want to, according to The Tyranny of E-Mail. And often we don’t want to, Freeman says. E-mail is addictive. He quotes University of Sheffield psychologist Tom Stafford to explain why. E-mail works on what is called the principle of variable interval reinforcement schedule, Stafford says. “Rather than reward an action every time it’s performed, you reward it sometimes, but not in a predictable way. So with email, usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there’s something wonderful - an invite out, or maybe some juicy gossip - and I get a reward.” When your e-mail program chimes or otherwise alerts you to new messages, you feel a thrill and interrupt what you’re doing to see if that juicy message has come through, in other words.

Some of the dangers of e-mail, according to the book: