'The Tyranny of E-mail': looking for a life beyond the e-mail tsunami

"The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox

by John Freeman

Scribner, 224 pp., $25

"A Letter is a Joy of Earth/It is denied the Gods," wrote the poet Emily Dickinson

But since the advent of electronic mail it is a "joy" many people forgo. As John Freeman points out in his thoughtful and provocative book, "The Tyranny of E-Mail," the pleasure of written correspondence has been curtailed dramatically by the format and staggering volume of messages clogging our virtual mailboxes.

"In 2007," he writes, "35 trillion messages shot back and forth between the world's 1 billion PCs ... In 2009, it has been estimated, the average corporate worker will spend more than 40 percent of his or her day sending and receiving some two hundred messages."

While acknowledging the convenience and utility of e-mail, Freeman (just named editor of the respected literary magazine, Granta) worries what all this rapid-response messaging is doing to us — as workers, family members and citizens.

The daily "tsunami" of computer mail, he contends, denies the mind "the experience of deep flow, when creative ideas flourish and complicated thinking occurs. We become task-oriented, tetchy, terrible at listening as we try to keep up with the computer." He also passes on study results that suggest "sixty-five percent of North Americans spend more time with their computer than their spouse."

Freeman's vigorous, graceful polemic opens with a short history of written correspondence. Looking back several thousand years (clay envelopes of that vintage have been unearthed in Turkey), he draws on many sources and statistics to document the advent and gradual ubiquity of paper letters — at first a hand-delivered luxury of the aristocracy and a tool of the military and governments. And he charts how letters became a popular, democratic medium conveyed vast distances by horseback, boat, rail and finally airplane.

The short-lived but fabled Pony Express, for instance, set a mail- delivery record in the mid-19th century by "carrying Pres. Abraham Lincoln's inaugural address from St. Joseph [Mo.] to Sacramento [Calif.] in seven days and 17 hours."

Few of us would want to go back to those good ol' days. But as he chronicles the development of the telegraph, typewriter and personal computer, Freeman raises pesky and familiar concerns about "life on the e-mail treadmill."

His discussions of "flaming" (online harassment) and the "disinhibition" encouraged by online anonymity, are insightful and sobering — as are his analyses of Spam and hacking. (Though nothing on Twittering.)

But the most controversial aspect of this slender tome are Freeman's guidelines for escaping e-mail overwhelm.

He advises against checking messages first thing in the morning (which can replace breakfast), or late at night (which can interfere with sleep).

But can we, as he proposes, limit e-mail checking to twice a day, at other times? For many of us, the genie is out of the bottle: so much of our work life is now conducted via e-mail, this is impossible.

A more workable tenet of Freeman's is to "give good e-mail" — keep messages short, to the point, don't engage sensitive, thorny matters better handled face to face (or voice to voice).

Above all, he suggests we cultivate what Buddhists call "mindfulness" — an awareness that gives us "the power to act and make decisions, to shape our own lives and truly touch other people." Amen.

Misha Berson is the theater critic for The Seattle Times.