I truly identified with the people quoted in "Going Postal" from the latest issue of the New York Magazine. I am an email addict with a laptop and a world-band GSM Treo that is capable of reading from multiple email accounts. It is hard for me to go a day without checking the email. (Christmas Day is very strange because the email volume drops so much.) So, when I read the article, I started to relate. Here are a few of the interesting comments:
- "The computer is now the ultimate Skinner box. You keep coming back for the reward," argues Lee Sproull, a professor of business at New York University. ... There is considerable gratification that comes from forever being needed, wanted -- popular, even. "It's sort of the way you used to feel about mail arriving from the postman," explains Sarah Crichton, the publisher of Little, Brown. "Possibly, just possibly, there would be something wonderful in one of those envelopes that would delight you, make your heart race a little faster. The difference with e-mail is that it keeps arriving all day long."
- America Online recently commissioned a study of Internet use and found that 47 percent of users now take their laptops on vacation, and 26 percent check their e-mail. "I've played the game of not taking my laptop on vacation," explains Barry Schuler, president of AOL Interactive Services. "What happens is that you sit there on the beach, gazing out into the ocean, but you can't relax because you're thinking about how many e-mails are accumulating in your in-box. I finally decided that I'm willing to take a couple of hours each day on vacation discreetly off in a corner doing my e-mail. It's worth feeling like a jerk in order to know that I'm on top of everything and I'm not going to return to 1,000 unanswered e-mails."
- "When you log on, you feel like you're in touch with everything that's going on in the world," says Judith Regan, publisher of Regan Books. "But what you really are is out of touch -- literally. There is no touching anymore. ... Here I am, sitting at home in front of my computer answering e-mail (on a Sunday) at ten in the morning when I should be in bed with a handsome guy making love."
- "E-mail may be the rudest form of communication yet invented," says Nathan Myhrvold, until recently the chief technology officer at Microsoft. E-mail eliminates tone of voice, body language, and the sort of social cues and contexts that make it possible to distinguish between different messages intended by the same words. In technological terms, e-mail has a limited emotional bandwidth.
New York Magazine always seems to have a great way of getting to the ultimate point. I highly recommend the article. You can even have New York Magazine email the article to you. Wouldn't that be something to look forward to in one of those little envelopes?
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