Q: You think we’re only at the beginning of the tyranny of e-mail, a sobering thought given the current deluge and the current misunderstandings.
A: This sort of messageopolis is just beginning to build. The thing I’m trying to say is we’re all sort of engineers and builders in that process, and the thing that’s nice about e-mail is if you have lots of correspondents and you start to change your habits or your behaviour and your attitude towards it, it has a multiplying effect because every e-mail you don’t send means an e-mail someone else doesn’t receive.
Q: You make it sound almost like a 12-step program. The first step—don’t send an e-mail you don’t need to—is going to be the hardest. Anyone who drops out puts himself in the outer darkness, in the sense of some part of him will be worried that he’ll be forgotten.
A: Yeah, isn’t that the thing? When you get on e-mail in the morning and you don’t have your usual hefty batch you think, “What happened? Has everybody forgotten about me?”
Q: Tell me about your coping strategies.
A: One of the directions of the book, I hope, was to try to focus on what the purpose of communication was so that we could decide what the parameters we’d allow it within our lives. Communication isn’t just about sharing information for business and for the purpose of doing your day-to-day tasks at the office, it’s also about sharing something, and if you don’t have a life outside the office—which e-mail makes harder and harder—you won’t have anything to share.
Q: All this angst and worry over a communications tool that you argue—and this is your deepest worry—inexorably fragments our attention and strips us of the ability to think in more coherent ways. It robs us, you wrote.
A: In so many novels, you read scenes—perhaps less so now but certainly in the 19th century—where people were alone with their thoughts. How would that be portrayed now? You couldn’t actually portray it because the character would probably have an iPod plugged into his ear, and he’d be checking his BlackBerry every eight minutes. If you saw it written down you’d think, “Jesus Christ, this person’s crazy!” But if you spend a lot of time in an office and you do use these devices, that’s what our thoughts are like.
Q: And in the end we’ll have nothing worth emailing about. Perhaps a random series of fragmented tweets?
A: The progression of the technology is certainly telling! But the thing to me that’s slightly encouraging is there is drop-off. Not every grandmother around the country is tweeting, and they probably won’t, because I think people are beginning to realize that there are some thoughts which are actually not thoughts, and some thoughts just don’t need to be shared, and some observations can go unrecorded.
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