The Trouble With a Great Technology

What was life like before the proliferation of e-mail? I can barely remember anymore, but I do recall that my daily activities weren’t so tightly tied to this electronic box called my computer.

Please don’t misunderstand. I love the conveniences that e-mail enables. It allows me to let everyone on the staff know when I’m changing the editorial production schedule. I can communicate easily with readers, or exchange messages with my sister when our time-zone difference makes phone calls unwieldy. I get terrific opt-in marketing messages from my favorite catalogers, and informative newsletters from trusted publishers.

In all, I get about 100 e-mail messages at work each day, and another 50 or so at my home account. (Some PR people have taken to calling me and asking: “Did you get my e-mail today?” My first thought usually is: “My gosh, I have no idea.”) Some e-mails are highly valuable to me, such as those from catalogers who have questions or comments about a recent article we’ve published or vendors telling us about their new products and services.

Other e-mails are pure spam that I delete without even opening, such as offers for Viagra, Russian brides, septic tank cleaning (I live in a condo) or tickets to traveling Broadway shows appearing in Seattle (I reside and work in Philadelphia). Someone needs to explain the concept of target marketing to some of these e-mailers. Or perhaps they should just subscribe to our sister publication Target Marketing.

Apparently I’m not alone in this thinking that e-mail sometimes is a bit too much to handle. And that’s too bad, because it really is a revolutionary technology, a “killer app” that has transformed the way we live, work and communicate.

But — and here’s my thesis — it’s also a technology that requires I devote time and attention to it. It demands that I do something, namely open, read and respond; save it; or delete. In short, it’s a communications technology I can’t simply turn on and ignore like I do TV or radio.

And that, I think, is what’s at the heart of all the recently passed and proposed e-mail regulations. E-mail, and particularly the proliferation of spam, has reached such a critical mass that we, as a society, need to now actually do something about it.

To make matters worse, this new daily duty comes right at the time in our history when most everyone is swamped. Corporations have cut staff, remaining employees are overburdened, companies are trying to remain efficient, and along comes this new technology that is wonderful and offers astounding capabilities — and is just way too demanding of what little free time we have left.

And so we grouse ... to our co-workers, mothers, spouses, perfect strangers, ISPs — and eventually, our legislators.

I love this technology, but it’s a love that brings baggage.