| Title | : | The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1416576738 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781416576730 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 256 |
| Publication | : | First published May 1, 2010 |
The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox Reviews
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3.5 stars. The correct title of the book is just The Tyranny of Email, and even that title is a little strong. Freeman's not a Luddite, trying to extract humankind from the internet. He's trying to examine just how much the advent of email has affected the way we communicate, think, and feel.
I started reading this book while shopping for a new smartphone. While reading the first half of the book, which is mostly a history of written communication, I was ready to get a top-of-the-line smartphone with internet browsing, GPS navigation, and a laser beam that enables telepathic communication with God. Many of the reservations that I've had about email and texting - it's speeding up our lives too much, it's destroying the art of the letter - have all been said before, be it about the telegraph or even the typewriter. So big whoop. Jack me in.
But when I got into the meat of the second half, I was ready to close my Facebook account, my Goodreads account, and all my email accounts. Instead of looking at smartphones, I was looking at the Jitterbug phone. I won't spoil the book and try to explain all the different bad and really scary ways email has changed the way we think, but Freeman's bottom line is that we've let email get out of control. It shapes us more that we shape it, and we need to take up the reins.
Freeman ends the book with some advice on how to beat back the email so that you remain a little more human and a little less Borg. This part's a little cheesy, and it's one of the weaker parts of the book. But if email stresses you out and you're still capable of reading 231 pages of text, I recommend you check out Freeman's book. And get a Jitterbug phone before you are assimilated. -
It is not often that I pan a book, but there is some serious laziness associated with Freeman's work here. This book should win recognition for the gluttony of random statistics that are pulled out of thin air and impossible to validate. There are so many instances of disconnected data to back up an already tired idea -- we use e-mail a lot in this society? Really? -- that they are simple to find by doing a random scan through the book. Let me just see, oh, here is one -- "By some estimates, 85-95 percent of all e-mail sent is spam, and dealing with it cost $140 billion in 2008." (page 120). Could he define spam and explain what it means to "deal with it?" No and no. It would be nice to verify this and any other claim, but Freeman does not footnote anything, though the New York Times should get royalties for the number of times Freeman uses it as a secondary source.
My personal favorite for laziness was Freeman's interview with Mr. Random Psychologist Tom Stafford of the University of Sheffield, who discusses the concept of variable interval reinforcement schedule to explain why people check their e-mail so often (pages 136-137). Why not go straight to the research of behaviorist B.F. Skinner who is widely associated with these schedules of reinforcement? Might as well have quoted me. I have taught this concept for eight years in high school psychology.
I don't ask a lot of an author of non-fiction, but I do expect him or her to defend a thesis with research avenues other than Wikipedia and Google.
Also, thanks for the history of the postcard and telegram. Cured the insomnia. -
I never thought that email was tyranical. Over the years I have just gotten used to email interruptions. On my desktops I even run 2 copies of gtalk so that I get an immediate popup when new email arrives.
Now that I have read this book I am thinking more about how to get work done in blocks and not get stuck in an email loop.
The book feels padded a bit but is still an interesting read. Mobile email will only make email worse in the future. The book didn't deal with IM which surprised me as this is far worse IMHO. I have one colleague who insists on IM, and shuns email - he wants an immediate response. Now that is a tyrant ! -
I use blinkist book summaries when a book only halfway interests me, and based on that summary and the reviews I will not be investing the time into the entire book.
Email might be doing 'evil' damage to our interpersonal communications, I get it.
Communications used to be slow, expensive, and perhaps more thoughtful. I get that too.
But, email is not going away other than when it is replaced by a form of communication that my generation will find even worse.
Onward. -
What I like : was expecting a thorough bashing of email, but pleasantly surprised with the history of evolution of communications over a period time which was covered in detail covering half the book
What I didn't like : nothing as such...good read . But towards the end, it is on predicted lines and gets a feeling of being dragged..
.5stars for first half and 4 stars for second half -
This book should be required reading for everyone who works in any corporate setting, at minimum, and frankly, everyone else whose job (or even life) require that they are tethered to an inbox for any part of a day. I found time to read this book in almost a single sitting, only by ignoring my email - and then went back to it with an entirely new perspective on how we as a society have become so dependent on this technology, and how to avoid its tyrannical reach.
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It's hard to ignore the irony—as the Internet becomes increasingly embedded in every aspect of our existence, print books about its effects on users proliferate. Some cast the Internet's influence as devastating, destroying the very definition of humanity; others speak in utopian superlatives about its power to unite everyone everywhere. John Freeman avoids both extremes, even as he does warn about the dangers of wholesale capitulation to The Tyranny of E-Mail.
He frames his argument in its historical context. The first third of the book presents a history of written communication from the military post of ancient empires, to handwritten letters and the emergence of affordable mail services, to telegrams, to email. Freeman focuses on how the use of these various tools shaped attitudes toward written communication, and how speed of delivery and the desire for exhaustive information were critical factors in the advancement of communication technology. It's a fairly brief but surprisingly detailed and well-conceptualized history.
When he gets to email, he shifts from history to neuroscience and sociology (though he still presents these in terms of relevant history). The chapter "This Is Your Brain on E-Mail" looks at the addictive nature of email and online communication in general. Freeman talks about how our online identities encourage us to be more uninhibited, and how our use of language online tends to be either more abusive or more ambiguous. A lot of this is familiar territory, but Freeman's treatment is far more lucid than that of many of his fellow tech commentators.
One of the most interesting ideas in the book is closely related to the idea of identity. Freeman thinks of the Internet as a massive experiment in group consciousness. In this analogy, email becomes an avenue of direct access to our inmost thoughts, a sort of translator for our subconscious that sends our inner self out into the broader consciousness shared by all. This, Freeman suggests, leads us to think of the Internet as an extension of our own brains, and therefore everything that happens on the Internet happens inside of us—we become vast, we contain multitudes. I found myself entranced every time he talked about this, and it made so much sense of the Internet and Internet culture.
Freeman's assessment is, not surprisingly, pretty bleak. But he doesn't leave readers in the outer darkness. Instead, he offers a tripartite manifesto for thinking about email: "Speed Matters," "The Physical World Matters," and "Context Matters." In the final chapter, he provides several ideas for mitigating the ill effects of email and for becoming more healthy individuals in an age of constant distraction and interruption. The goal is not to never use email, but to use it in such a way that we don't become slaves to the trivial or to others' opinions of ourselves. Freeman's book is nearly ten years old, but it is still just as relevant as when it was first published. -
"By parceling our days into smaller and smaller units, by giving us the impression that we can reach all people, at all times, e-mail is helping to put this cycle of overworking and impatient desire for gratification into hyperdrive. We work to live, the saying goes, but when work takes everything, what's the point?"
With a provocative title like that you need a stable argument but Freeman doesn't build a case as much as he merely points out obvious truths. His argument, then, becomes self-evident: this fantastic tool not only has the ability to change our lives for the worse, it has already done so. Simple observations--like the technology we use shapes us--that aren't often considered credible by mainstream society are easily and plausably mentioned, here.
The opening chapter sets the tone before he delves into older communication that also shrank the world and altered us: mail and the telegraph. Add in the standardization of time, and modern humans were prime candidates for the acceleration of communication. This look back lays the foundation for tackling how e-mail is shaping us.
Three minor criticisms. 1) The narrative drags a bit in the history part. 2) The focus is on indrustrial countries and their office workers, which he acknowledges--not all of us are plugged in, as it were. 3) No citations, although there is a bibliography.
Minor, I say, because he also gives us ten suggestions for cutting back or eliminating e-mail. How many point-out-the-problem-books offer up solid, workable solutions?
"Technology amplifies human instincts and desires, but it must obey the laws of nature if it is to sustain human life, not destroy it. And so we must remember we are part of nature, too. We may be dependent on machines, but we operate like them at our peril....Technology that appears to transcend the limits of the physical world merely shifts the costs of its use elsewhere." -
Reading this book gave me anxiety while explaining to me why email gives me anxiety; it also made me nostalgic for the time before email. I felt this way when I arrived at college, too, right before everyone first got email addresses. I wanted to keep writing letters! Obviously that didn't work out so well for me. I think it's a big loss, though. I think communicating now is almost *too* easy, and it's not necessarily even communicating, since the risk of misinterprating tone without visual or auditory clues is huge.
I really liked reading about the history of mail, the post office industry in various countries, and Freemans' theories about the changing concept of "now" / the erosion between Work Time and Personal Time. When we hit send/receive or click our inboxes, we're rewarding randomly, thus ensuring we come back with increased frequency; this is apparently similar to a gambler's rush. The book also discusses how each new invention, from the telegraph to the fax to universal time has caused anxiety in people throughout history.
The author's tips for clearing the clutter and restoring more face-time with people we truly care about (thus also minimizing the risk of misinterpreting tone) were great and I hope to implement them.
His most basic suggestion? Don't Send. -
The vocabulary and sentence-building capability of this author made me swoon. This was not the type of book you expect to be gorgeously written, but it most definitely was!
The story started out with great momentum tracking the history of communication from clay tablets to the telegraph to today's beeping smart phones. And it was all great! The author also offered some helpful tips that even I, a recent convert to email haterism, could take to heart in shaping the type and amount of communication that is constantly weighing on our electronic lives.
Why did I give it three stars? It just got long. That is a terrible thing to say, but I was honestly plowing through the last 40 or so pages of this book at the rate of one page per night. Full disclosure: I was in the first trimester of my pregnancy, not feeling well, and VERY tired. But still, come on! There's gotta be a reason those first pages flew by.
I do recommend this book, though and I am in major awe of Freeman's verbal acrobatics, especially sharp in the beginning of the book. Yeow! And if nothing else: someone has GOT to speak up about the way our electronic lives are eating the other more meaningful parts for dinner. For example, I am writing this right now at 9:30 p.m. and not laying on the couch reading with my husband. It's got to stop! -
I heard the author speak on public radio, and was compelled to read this book!
Things I liked:
- The reminder that communication hasn't always been this way, and that it's not necessarily ideal!
-I thought this was a great observation: "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 control mechanical functions such as heartbeat and breathing, as well as reational 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 we want a reward we need to keep pulling that lever...So it is with our email. We need to keep clicking...to get the reward we've come to expect will arrive sooner or later. _Someone is thinking of me_..."
- I like this rule: " Do Not Debate Complex or Sensitive Matters by E-mail."
Things I didn't like:
- Ultimatetly it was not very good as a manifesto--much better as a history of our communication methods, and a think-piece on why we might not be fully equipped to handle the barrage of information handed down to us by our electronic devices. -
Another book on "philosophy of technology" and how technology affects the human behavior and human brain... To be read with the book by Nicholas Carr "The Big Switch: Our New Digital Destiny" and the two articles "Is google making us stupid",
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807..., and "The autumn of multitaskers",
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711... "Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy."
An interesting paragraph in the chapter "This is your brain on e-mail" [to be completed:]
There is a link with another book that seems to be interesting: "The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory" by Torkel Klingberg. -
This was like an advance essay on 'Advantages and disadvantages of Technology' I used to write in 7th grade. Not taking anything away from the author, it's just the right amount of information you need to have yourself cut back on social media, where we constantly refresh pages and newsfeeds.
Like a good old research paper, it starts from the beginning of ways of communications among men, on to our modernised lives, and then some advice on how to control it.
Recommended for anyone who is addicted to checking online updates (not necessarily emails), prefers something light to read, or maybe wants to break away from thick text. -
What I've read so far is great. Do you know the average worker sends or receives 200 e-mails every day? Every day! I believe it, oh boy, do I! I have had times where I've been gone one day and have 89 new messages in my in box. E-mails can decrease efficiency and communication. I get e-mails from the people that sit less than 10 feet from me because we all want it in writing to CYA. Blerg! The author gives suggestions at the end of the book on how to end the tyranny. Not that I skipped ahead or anything...
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This was a super interesting book - a history of how we humans have communicated via the written word. From prehistory scribbles to the development of the printed word, to the postal service and now email, this book takes us through the ways in which how we say something affects what we say, who hears it, how fast they receive the information and how all of that affects our understanding of time and space. It really is cool. And the end has some VERY practical tips for how to take control of your email, so your email does not control you. I highly recommend it.
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I get it, but unfortunately there is a 'the-sky-is-falling-!!' kind of feel to this book. I agree that the over use of technology is kind of undermining our society; just look at texting-while-driving (not to mention watching DVD's while driving). The author does concede that there are benefits to a lot of the technology available out there. I suppose this would do more for me if I were more of an email/internet addict.
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Decent extended essay on how we've let e-mail take over every waking hour: "It has encouraged flotillas of unnecessary jabbering, making it difficult to tell signal from noise. It has made it more difficult to read slowly and enjoy it, hastening the already declining rates of literacy. It has made it harder to listen and mean it, to be idle and not fidget."
Of course, I checked my e-mail several times while reading this book. -
Fabulous book. One of those books that you read and then say, duh why didn't anyone write this book already, it is completely true and everyone needs to think about these things. Great history of email's history (and what came before it) and how it affects us today. And some excellent specific ideas of what to do to change your relationship with e-mail. A great read.
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Somewhat interesting, though as someone who doesn't have a deluge of work email, I found parts of it not as relevant as others might. The best part of the book was the last two chapters were he gives advice and a vision of a world were email is less demanding and more sane. I wish he would have spent less time talking about the development of the postal system and more time on that.
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This book does a great job describing the accelerating pace of communication over time, and the stressful world of work email. It is an entertaining read, and does a nice job discussing some alternatives to the email treadmill. I read this a few years ago now, so my memory of specifics is vague, but the sense of how meaningful it was to me remains.
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Read a chapter in an airline magazine and it looks promising. He seems to address and explore many of the points I find myself thinking about when sitting in front of the computer screen (like right now).
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Great background on human communication leading up to email. The author sets up the problem nicely and then offers ten tips in the last chapter. The tips are not given more than a few paragraphs explaination.
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A good historical over view of communication. Lacking in original thought, but it could be that I work in an environment that gives me a first hand glimpse into "The Tyranny of Email," as the author titled his book.
