John Freeman tries to escape 'The Tyranny of E-Mail'
John Freeman, a longtime book critic who recently became the editor of the literary magazine Granta, has written a new book called "The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox" (Simon & Schuster, $25).
He's conceived of the subject in the broadest possible terms: He begins with an ancient Sumerian love poem and tracks the Arabian use of pigeons, the growth of literacy, the golden age of letter-writing in 19th century Europe, up to the telegraph, ZIP codes and development of computers.
Some of Freeman's observations are familiar (the Internet has isolated us from one another), and others are fresher, as when he likens President Barack Obama, besieged by his BlackBerry, to President Abraham Lincoln overwhelmed by telegrams. We spoke with Freeman, 34, from Granta's New York office.
What made you want to write about e-mail?
I was working [as president] for the National Book Critics Circle, getting 200 or 300 messages a day, and I thought, "This is insane." At first, I thought it was just me, because I was the head of an organization with a lot of members. But I saw a note online about the fact that the average office worker would send and receive 200 messages a day in 2009.
Your book traces the incredible labor people once went through to send a message, especially internationally. E-mail is vastly more convenient. We got here by choice, didn't we?
We did. But now that e-mail is an integral part of working in an office, there's a lot of pressure to stay on it. You check it in the middle of the night. I don't think we have a framework for how to operate in this context. I saw this book as a chance to pause, look at the context we're building and ask if it's working.
We can only rely on what we think of as common sense to decide what's appropriate?
I found a study done by Stanford University about Internet use - it said that people's use of the Internet, which was primarily e-mail, was not coming out of their time with television and other media, it was on top of it. So this wonderful technology, which has so many conveniences, was actually heightening this isolation that we feel, and driving us away from people right in front of us.
So how do we take back our lives from the machine?
Just don't send a message. So much of what we send we could first stop and think, "Do I really need to send this? Do I really need to be logged on right now? Is there an urgent situation that means that I should check my mail?"
It's like any kind of drug - there are chemical effects to e-mail. It's difficult at first, but whenever I go on vacation, I completely shut off. It's a little antsy for half a day, and then I remember what it's like to be in a moment. I think that's necessary to have a meaningful life or a meaningful relationship.
