In the early days of the inbox, it afforded the naive human organism a certain pleasure to receive an e-mail. So a note or two of greetings whistled through the lonely day. Thanks to e-mail, the eloquence of a moribund letter-writing culture received a rejuvenating jolt of immediacy. As late as the late 1990s and early 2000s, during the last days of dial-up, it still felt nice to send and receive the occasional squib, to play a game of catch with some friends. Sometimes you would even forward a joke, a practice that nowadays seems a crime.
For it has lately become clear that nothing burdens a life like an e-mail account. It’s the old story: the new efficient technology ends up costing far more time than it ever saves, because it breeds new expectations of what a person can possibly do. So commuters in their fast cars spend hours each day in slow traffic, and then at the office they read and send e-mail.
Correct e-mailing practice does not exist. The true mood of the form is spontaneity, alacrity — the right time to reply to a message is right away. But do that and your life is gone. So you reject the. spontaneous spirit of e-mail; you bold off replying for hours, days, even weeks. By then the e-mail has gone stale, and your reply is bound to be labored. You compensate for the offence with a needlessly elaborate message.
Of course you could always reply gruffly, and in lowercase. Moreover, you could refuse to reply at all except where some practical matter was at issue. But Western civilization has always reserved for correspondence its most refined gestures of courtesy, and a memory of the old days persists. Over e-mail, you can be in touch with so many people — and make each one mad at you. And they are mad at you, your former friends, because no more efficient vehicle for the transmission of rashness and spleen has ever been devised than the e-mail. Nettled by something — often something imaginary, since no one’s tone comes across quite right, over e-mail — you lash out instantaneously. You hit SEND and it’s too late. It’s too late because it’s too soon.
E-mail is good for one thing only: flirtation. The problem with flirtation has always been that the nervousness you feel in front of the object of your infatuation deprives you of your wittiness.
But with e-mail you can spend an hour refining a casual remark. The e-mail, like the Petrarchan sonnet, is properly a seduction device. But one has many correspondents, and few if any lovers. Individually, they’re all decent people; collectively they form an army marching to invade your isolation and steal your valuable time. Nietzsche declared that one should set aside an hour a week for reading letters; anything more was toxic.
And now we read in the paper where Gloria Steinem is complaining that she spends three hours a day replying to e-mail. America, most efficient country on earth, is in fact a nightmare economy of squandered time. Our economic system condemns people to work in offices and send e-mail; that’s what they do there. Then they go home and take with them all the work they were supposed to be doing all day.
For a while, c-marl, in its efficiency, had seemed to serve very nicely the means of production and their owners. But lately, the business pages report a dialectical reversal whereby the means of communication overwhelm the means of production, so that the class of owners and managers can hardly do or even supervise any work; they can only discuss, over e-mail, the things they should be doing.
Western civilization has become a giant inbox; it will swell and groan but never be empty till it crashes. Yes, it may be that all of us together, tapping out ephemera at our keyboards, will bring down this civilization once and for all. The word "alacrity" in Paragraph 3 probably means