Coping with the Net
In a recent article technology critic Heather Menzies presents some rather disturbing survey results on how much time Canadian academics actually have to read, discuss, and otherwise engage with ideas.
The general pattern is that everyone is much too overwhelmed by the daily information flows. My experience is certainly no different, and I suspect that this is not just an academic ailment. With the convenience of google, wikipedia, and 1001 tailor-made blogs comes a tidal wave of information that demands to be at least filtered, if not actually read.
I'm not even talking about spam, although there is a current of that washing over my desk that threatens to wash me away as well. My daily dose of legitimate e-mail, mailing list subscriptions, and RSS feeds—things I feel are necessary to keep me basically informed—are enough to suck up a good chunk of every workday. I'm not alone. We as a culture have signed up for staggeringly large information and communication flows. So how do we cope with it?
As of about October this past year, e-mail turned into a bugbear for me. I think the critical point was when I stopped being able to keep my inbox at least organized. Previously, I'd been fairly disciplined about sorting incoming e-mail, and my inbox would only ever keep 20-odd messages: only the active, to-do kind. But sometime this fall, it got out from under me and my inbox now has about 400 messages in it. I've "read" them all, but sorting them is now a job that will only happen some rainy sunday. The immediate result is that my relationship with all those read-but-not-really-finished messages is much more indeterminate. Have I really dealt with it all, or not? Hard to say, without dredging through it all again.
A colleague of mine, for whom I have the utmost respect, boasted once that when he returns from a long trip, he just deletes all the mail up until the last 5 days, and lets the chips fall where they may. I've never had the guts to do that, but I have to admit, it strikes me now as an entirely sane idea. Another colleague has a policy of never answering e-mail in the first 24 hours, just to stave off the expectation of immediate reply. Another sane idea.
Getting Out of Your In-box
A good chunk of what eats up my in-box is postings from about 8 or 9 mailing lists I've subscribed to over the year. I always subscribe to mailing lists in "digest mode," which collects a day's worth of messages into a single mail, which helps, but it still piles up. What complicates my relationship to it is that I know there is valuable information in there, but I have to take more time sitting in front of the e-mail in order to get to it. The bad attitude I develop about the usual "to-do" mail spills over to the mailing lists as well.
Our librarian, Nina, pointed out that the real success of RSS is that it pulls the information that you actually want to read out of your e-mail and puts it in another context, where you can browse it with a happier outlook. This is true, I think. But—as when all the sane people leaving the city leaves the city to the crazies—this leaves your e-mail inbox with nothing but negative associations. Not a particularly healthy situation.
The Emotional Charge
One thing I've noticed of late is the emotional content—or lack thereof—in e-mail. Much of the legimitate e-mail I receive consists of very short, one-line requests for me to do something or comment on something. I understand the motivation to write messages like this, and I do it too: you're trying to work through the e-mail as quickly as you can, and you know that your colleagues are doing the same, so you try to make it as brief and efficient as possible. Hence the one-liners.
The unfortunate result is that the whole medium of e-mail gets colder and harsher as time goes on. It becomes a long gauntlet of terse directives that one runs through daily. And even though the authors of these terse notes are otherwise friendly, nice people, the 'net' result is a further contribution to the overall negative feelings I have toward e-mail.
What made me notice this last bit was the odd e-mail I would receive with some gratuitous friendliness written in. On in particular, from an ex-student writing to ask me for some database recommendations, began with a warm salutation, and ended with a wish for my well-being. Not such a radical thing—certainly we were all taught to write letters this way back in grade school. But this is something that has simply been squeezed out of e-mail by the intense pressure of volume.
So, one of my new year's resolutions this year has been to follow this example and try to inject a little warmth in my e-mails. I don't think I'm batting 500 on this one yet, but it remains a serious goal. And with this little posting, I hope I can infect you with this idea too.
Hope this message finds you well,
-- JMax?
P.S. Eichhorn's article, "The Tyranny of E-Mail" has some great tips for ensuring that e-mail doesn't detroy your day-to-day productivity: http://www.w-uh.com/articles/030308-tyranny_of_email.html
P.P.S The Menzies article is at http://www.ocufa.on.ca/AMWinter/No_Time_to_Think.pdf
Comments:
Dear John, --gmm, Sat, 20 Jan 2007 19:32:13 -0800 reply
Make less friends. Sincerely, ger.
emotional content --edominey, Thu, 22 Mar 2007 16:54:01 -0800 reply
that's fewer friends, gerilee. yours truly, erna
sigh, i *know* erna --gmm, Thu, 22 Mar 2007 23:36:38 -0800 reply
but, make less friends sounds much funnier than make fewer friends.
yours sarcasticly, ger.