The Tyranny of E-mail

by John Freeman

  He’s not alone. Nearly half the people in AOL’s survey claimed that they were addicted to e-mail. The technology that was supposed to set us free to work from 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 the machine, to marry the damn thing; it has become our iron lung. “I have friends and relatives that carry BlackBerrys 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 “crackberry” was Webster’s New World College Dictionary’s 2006 word of the year.

  The most “addicted” metropolis in America is, not surprisingly, New York, the city that never sleeps—and apparently never stops clicking: 50 percent of Gothamites feel they are addicted to their e-mail. Lunch hour in Manhattan can sometimes feel like an outtake from a strange daylight zombie film: e-mail drones, flicking and scrolling through their handhelds, checking e-mails that they could just as easily read twenty minutes later at their desk, are given a wide berth on city streets by the not-yet-addicted.

  There are several reasons for this burgeoning obsession. Mail has always traveled to us with a small but palpable comet 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 also be postcards from friends, Christmas cards, magazines, or maybe more. In 1967, the direct marketing firm Publishers Clearing House launched a prize giveaway. It might not just be your subscription of Runner’s World in your mailbox; it might also be a $1 million check with 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 e-mail. 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 ten months later. As of June 2009, that number had reached 28.5 million worldwide, and that doesn’t even count people using e-mail-enabled cellular phones. Millions upon millions of people the world over now can and do constantly access their e-mail. Psychologists have discovered that their behavior in doing so is very like that of people sitting before a slot machine.

  Neurologists now understand why these standbys of casinos are addictive: they work on a principle called variable interval reinforcement schedule, which Tom Stafford, a lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Sheffield, explained has been established as the way to train the strongest habits. “This means that rather than reward an action every time it is 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.”

  There are chemical reasons for why this reward feels good, reasons that go beyond the quality or 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 payout—dopamine, the hormone and neurotransmitter, floods the anterior cingulate, the part of the brain that appears to control 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 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 a reward we need to keep pulling that lever.

  So it is with our e-mail. We need to keep clicking that send/ receive tab—even when our computer is set to automatically check e-mail every ninety seconds—to get the reward we’ve come to expect will arrive sooner or later. Someone is thinking of me. 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 forty-four seconds to respond to an e-mail pop-up alert on their computer. Seventy percent of alerts provoked a reaction in just seven seconds.

  As with any vice, it’s a disaster when you take e-mail away, even if for only 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 offline.” In 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 offline causes huge amounts of stress for companies, 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. Ten 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 e-mail dependency, if they don’t grow out of a psychological dimension, can soon acquire one, as with any chemical dependency. “If I didn’t hear ‘beepbeep’ every time I turn on the computer,” said one senior citizen who adopted e-mail in 1994, “I’d 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 new communications environment that enables us to constantly feed that need—to be plugged in, surrounded by links to all of our friends and colleagues. Artemio Ramirez, Jr., an assistant professor at the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University, 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 said. It’s a basic human desire—yet the way that e-mail has speeded it up has destroyed our ability to want much else.

  For these reasons, some psychologists are pushing to have “Internet addiction” 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, 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 are in for perpetual disappointment. “When we log in to our e-mail server,” writes Richard DeGrandpre in Digitopia, “the expectation of finding new mail negates any possible excitement or surprise; if there’s no new mail, we’re disappointed.” So we check it more and more. As the 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, Block says, tended 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.

  Working in a Climate of Interruption

  In the era of e-mail, instant messaging, Googling, e-commerce and iTunes, potential distractions while seated at a computer are not only ever-present but very enticing. Distracting oneself used to consist of sharpening a half-dozen pencils or lighting a cigarette. Today, there is a universe of diversions to buy, hear, watch and forward, which makes focusing on a task all the more challenging.

  — KATIE HAFNER

  What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

  — HERB SIMON

  We work in the most distraction-prone workplace in the history of mankind. We can be re
ached on the phone, by fax, instant message, Facebook, text message, cellular phone, letter, and occasionally in person. Throughout the day, for many people and especially for the very busy, these various channels and machines are blinking and beeping like an ambulance trying to cross a busy intersection at rush hour. In 2006, one study found that the average U.S. office worker was interrupted eleven times an hour. The cost of these interruptions, in which e-mail plays a large role, runs close to $600 billion in the United States alone.

  We live in a culture in which doing everything all at once is admired and encouraged—have our spreadsheet open while we check e-mail, chin the phone into our shoulder, and accept notes from a passing office messenger. Our desk is Grand Central and we are the conductor, and it feels good. Why? If we’re this busy, clearly we’re needed; we have a purpose. We are essential. The Internet and e-mail have certainly created a “desire to be in the know, to not be left out, that ends up taking up a lot of our time”—at the expense of getting things done, said Mark Ellwood, the president of Pace Productivity, which studies how employees spend their time.

  The evidence is in, though, and we can’t multitask the way the technology we use at work leads us to believe we can. Our brains are what’s telling us this. “Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways,” Walter Kirn wrote in an essay called “The Autumn of the Multitaskers” in 2007. “At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning.”

  A UCLA experiment bore this out. A group of twentysomethings were asked to sort a deck of cards—once in silence, a second time while listening to randomly selected sounds in search of specific tones. “The subjects’ brains coped with the additional task by shifting responsibility from the hippocampus— which stores and recalls information—to the striatum,” Kirn explained, “which takes care of rote, repetitive activities. Thanks to this switch, the subjects managed to sort the cards just as well with the musical distraction—but they had a much harder time remembering what, exactly, they’d been sorting once the experiment was over.”

  In other words, a work climate that revolves around multitasking and constant interruptions has narrowed our cognitive window down to a core, basic facility: rote, mechanical tasks. We like to think we are in control of our environment, that we act upon it and shape it to our needs. It works both ways, though; changes we make to the world can have unseen ramifications that impact our ability to live in it. And research is revealing that our use of technology has begun to alter our attention span; we’ve started reverse engineering our brains for speed, as opposed to mindfulness. It is perhaps for this reason—aside from its continuing cultural marginalization as an irrelevant art form—that poetry, despite being short and bite-sized, has not become a national pastime in the age of the Internet. As Donald Revell has pointed out, poetry is not about brevity or length but about attention, and “attention is a question of entirety, of being wholly present.”

  The longer we work this way, the harder it’s going to be to do things that force us out of our reactive, dronelike existence, such as reading a novel or even a long magazine piece. “Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy,” wrote Nicholas Carr in an essay entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” “My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do.”

  There’s a reason for this: Reading and other meditative tasks are best performed in what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called a “state of flow,” in which our focus narrows, the world seems to drop away, and we become less conscious of ourselves and more deeply immersed in ideas and language and complex thought. Many communication tools, however, actually inhibit this state. “Telephones and tape recorders, computers and fax machines are more efficient in conveying news,” Csikszentmihalyi wrote in 1991, before e-mail had become as pervasive as all of these tools. “If only the point to writing were to transmit information, then it would deserve to become obsolete. But the point of writing is to create information, not to pass it along.”

  A whole new field of attention studies has emerged to capture the shift that has already occurred in how the brain works. One of the most intriguing recent findings in this area came from a Swedish cognitive scientist, Torkel Klingberg, who posited in The Overflowing Brain that there are roughly two types of attention: one a controlled, task-oriented kind, such as that required to crunch a spreadsheet; the other a stimulus-driven kind of attention, such as the way a car horn causes us to whip our heads around and prevents us, in most cases, from stepping out into a busy street. Klingberg connects these two types of attention to two kinds of memory: short-term working memory and long-term memory.

  The implications of this model on modern working life are enormous, as the greatest challenge presented by working in an environment of constant stimuli is maintaining focus, as well as keeping a lifeline to our working memory. One two-year study with children Klingberg cited showed that working at overload capacity does, in fact, improve working memory and possibly even problem-solving skills. Multitasking may not be perfect, but it can push the brain to add new capacity; the problem, however, remains that the small gains in capacity are continuously, rapidly outstripped by the speeding up and growing volume of incoming demands on our attention. The center, it turns out, just won’t hold; so we create and push out into this world a kind of orienting capsule: ourselves.

  The Digital Self: Introducing a Whole New You

  No modern technology since the automobile has been more associated with our selves—the freedom to be, to explore, to augment and design ourselves—than the Internet. If you bought a plum-colored Dodge Charger in 1970, you were expressing, in a not very subtle way, that you were no shrinking violet. We now have a similar, much cheaper opportunity for transformation just by connecting to the Internet. Which “profile” do you want to use on your home PC? Which e-mail account? Do you want to be AmyWilliams1972@yahoo.com? Or would you rather be surferchick1972@yahoo.com? Depending on what circles this (fictional) Amy Williams traveled in, perhaps it would be better to go as Amy. Williams1972@fas.harvard.edu—as long as she was actually, of course, an alumna of Harvard University.

  Our addresses, in a simple way, say who we are and what we do, what we care about. They are a starting point of an interaction even more than a name since they can be chosen and manipulated. One study of 599 accounts in Germany showed that judgments made about people based solely on their e-mail addresses were ballpark correct and that observers made subtle distinctions from one address to another.

  These addresses are just a very small signal—like the turning of leaves before a coming storm—of the enormous change brought about by the Internet with regard to our notions of a self. The rise of Internet-based communications, communities, and entire identities has become a fascinating way to watch people behave and negotiate their new, unhinged digital selves. The medium, as it turns out, isn’t just the message; it’s a hall of mirrors. In psychoanalytic terms, writes John Suler, a professor of psychology at Rider University, “computers and cyberspace may become a type of ‘transitional space’ that is an extension of the individual’s intrapsychic world. It may be experienced as an intermediate zone between self and other that is part self and part other. As they read on their screen the e-mail, newsgroup, or chat message written by an internet comrade, some people feel as if their mind is merged or blended with that of the other.”

  What Rider is describing is called, in psychological terms, merger transference, and it starts, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, with the computer itself. Our computers have become extensions of ou
rselves—of our inner space—housing our personal letters and work and music and movies and most private financial information, sometimes all in one place. The visual cues that we have left our “desktop” and are now “out” on the information highway when we launched a browser, though, are quite small; we still feel “in” there, inside our extended head. So it’s extremely easy to feel as if somehow everything we do and everyone we interact with will play out inside us as well.

  For those who struggle with this boundary, the computer and working via e-mail have made us, in a sense, narcissists. In his essay “On Narcissism,” Sigmund Freud proposed two ideas of the narcissist: one revolved around the concept of self-love, the other stemmed from a state of mind that has no awareness that the self and other exist. Working over the computer and via the Internet, we have numerous cues that feed both instincts. Many of the most popular Web sites cater to our idea of selfhood and agency: MySpace.com; YouTube; YouPorn.com (don’t laugh, it’s routinely in the top thirty most visited sites in America).

  Working over e-mail also reinforces this sense of being at the center of things—with a complicated caveat. The nature of the computing interface and the emotional attachment we forge to the machine make it harder and harder to remember that this voice, this text on the machine has come from outside of us. Suler explains that for some Internet users, “reading another person’s message might be experienced as a voice within one’s head, as if that person magically has been inserted or ‘introjected’ into one’s psyche.”

  Thus, criticism that zings in over e-mail can feel like shouting; it can also flush out our deepest self-doubts and begin to sound more like an echo of ourselves than a comment from outside. We have several defenses against this—we can fire right back or flame, which I will discuss later. Or we can dissemble, improvise, or blend into the background. It used to be that clothes made the man, but for the hours we’re on the Internet or typing to one another, that’s not so. We can be whoever we want to be on a scale that’s never before existed or been quite so easy.