#16
International Herald Tribune
December 6, 2001
MEANWHILE
More and More E-Mail That Says Less and Less
By Shashi Tharoor
Shashi Tharoor, author of the new novel "RIOT," can be visited, but
not e-mailed, at www.shashitharoor.com
He contributed this comment to the
International Herald Tribune.
NEW YORK It is one of the paradoxes of our times that inventions meant to speed matters up inevitably end up slowing us down. When e-mail first came into my life, I was thrilled. Instead of correspondence piling up for months as I struggled to find the time to reply, instead of faxes not going through and cables that cost an arm and a leg per word, I now had a means of delivering messages instantaneously, efficiently and free. I became an avid and diligent e-mailer.
How I regret it. I get more than 100 e-mails a day, sometimes twice that. Some of them are urgent work-related questions. Some of them are personal letters. Some are one-line queries, others lengthy documents requiring perusal and comment. Some are unsolicited junk mail. An astonishingly large number are jokes, of varying quality, both verbal and visual. And increasingly, some carry viruses that have attached themselves to the address books of friends, with attachments which, if opened, could destroy my computer.
Because they are on the screen, I have to go through them all, if only to make sure that I don't need to read them. And this is a chore that has been taking more and more of my time. When e-mail first came into vogue, one could spend 15 to 20 minutes a day on it. Now receiving and sending e-mails adds two to three hours to an average day. And since one's other work doesn't stop, those are hours added to one's day, and therefore subtracted from one's life. A convenience has become a burden.
When I am at my computer, I find myself neglecting more important matters that have come to me by "snail mail." E-mails automatically become urgent - because if you don't reply to one immediately, it will soon be swamped by many others and you will forget that you have failed to reply to it. You find yourself scrambling to attend to e-mails of utter triviality for no other reason than to get past them to the possibly important ones. The result is "information fatigue" and an ever-shortening attention span in the face of what seems an unstoppable flood of facts.
This is a global problem - an estimated 6.1 billion e-mails are sent out daily around the world, and the figure continues to increase. As technology advances, it has become more and more difficult to escape e-mail. Now people are plugging in laptops on planes and trains to read their mail, and the latest text-equipped cell phones allow people to check their e-mail wherever they are.
It's almost enough to have one longing again for the day when information was a scarce resource. Indeed, addiction to e-mail is increasingly being recognized as a malady. The British national lottery operators, Camelot, passed an edict recently banning e-mails on Fridays. They wanted staff to talk to each other instead, at least one day a week. But the experiment was abandoned within a month. People are simply too used to the convenience of e-mail.
Part of the problem is allowing the avatars of progress to persuade us that new inventions should replace old ones, when in fact they simply add to both our conveniences and our burdens. Now we have more and more means of reaching each other, with less and less worth saying.
There is an inverse relationship between the difficulty and expense of communication, and the quality of what is communicated. Without even the price of a stamp to deter the prolix, the unmanageable tsunami of e-mail threatens to drown the world in information.
How is one to cope? It's a question of attitude. A few weeks ago, I replied, briefly and courteously but negatively, to a student at Trivandrum University in India who had made some patently impossible request. His immediate reply was instructive: "I am astonished to hear from you directly. I expected some secretary would have deleted my e-mail." His candor has taught me a lesson.
Instead of treating each e-mail as an obligation, I shall soon be asking my secretary to do just what he suggested.
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