Is Email
Evil?
Overflowing inboxes are wrecking productivity and making
people feel guilty. Is the technology to blame, or are we?
Adrienne lafrance theatlantic.com
NOV 12, 2015
Sometime in the past 20 years,
people soured on email. Culturally, it went from delightful to
burdensome, a shift that’s reflected in the very language of the inbox. In the
1990s, AOL would gleefully announce, “You’ve got mail!” Today, Gmail celebrates
the opposite: “No new mail!”
So what happened to email? What
happened to us?
These are some of the questions that
come up in the new technology podcastCodebreaker,
the first season of which is fixated on the question, “Is it evil?”
“In some ways, [email] is like
technology that was built when the world was new, yet we still use it all the
time,” Codebreaker’s host, Ben Brock Johnson, told me. “There are
some real tensions that come from that, that come from the fact that it’s this
free thing that anybody can send to anybody... and we can all send as many as
we want.”
All of that is, theoretically, what
makes email great, too. “You can't kill email! It’s the cockroach of the
Internet,” Alexis Madrigal wrote for The Atlantic last
year, “and I mean that as a compliment. This resilience is a good thing.”
“Email is the last great unowned
technology,” said the Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain in the first
episode of Codebreaker, “and by unowned I mean there is no CEO of
email... it’s just a shared hallucination that works.”
“Email is not evil. We are evil.”
And while email may work,
technically, there’s a profound sentiment—in tech circles, especially—that
there’s something deeply wrong with the way people email today. Maybe not
surprisingly, most email is “total garbage,” Johnson says, and that’s the stuff
that doesn’t even make it to your inbox. Spam filters areactually pretty good, so this virtual
garbage-pile isn’t the real problem. The thing about email that bogs people
down is the sorting, and responding, the unsubscribing, the reaching out, the
circling back.
People are, clearly, consumed by
their inboxes. On average, people check their email about 77 times per day,
according to Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of
California, Irvine. (On the high end, people checked their inboxes 373 times a
day.) “The more email people do, the lower is their assessed productivity,”
Mark said in the podcast. “[and] the lower is their positive mood at the end of
the day.”
Mark also notes a psychological
disconnect between the writing of an email and the receiving of one, a paradox
that Johnson told me he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about since: Reading
email is correlated with stress, actually typing and sending email is not.
“That, to me, was a totally eureka moment,” Johnson said.
“Where Gloria Mark says it feels good to send email, but it feels bad to
receive. That has changed my behavior. I have been more thoughtful about how I
send email: Why am I sending this email? Is this the most direct way to deal
with whatever I am trying to deal with?”
“I am also really bad at managing my own email,” Johnson
added. “I am abysmal. I have 12,069 unreads in my gmail right now. People look
at that and they get panic attacks on my behalf.”
Several studies have found email hurts productivity and
makes people feel bad. “I just think we have to rethink email, and even
redesign the way email is used,” Mark said in Codebreaker’s first
episode.
She’s not alone in that assessment. But what would a reboot
of this nature even look like? And what would it mean for email’s cultural
standing? (These are some of the questions I'm exploring for an upcoming
story, and it's clear already that they have fascinating, if incomplete,
answers.)
Already there are alternatives, or at least complements, to
the inbox-outbox cycle: Various private messengers and chat platforms like
Slack have been described as email slayers, or at least means of chipping away
at its hold on people. Teenagers barely email one another. Just 6 percent of
them reported sending daily emails in a 2011 Pew survey. (A time when, it should
be noted, Snapchat was in it infancy and platforms like YikYak and Vine didn’t
even exist yet.)
“Email is not evil,” said Sabri Ben-Achour, a reporter for
Marketplace, in theCodebreaker debut. “We are evil. Email
dismantles the barriers and the filters that we have erected to contain our
evil selves.”
Even if email’s not outright evil, it does seem to be broken
in some way. And if we’re the ones who broke it, it will be up to us to fix it,
too.
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