A Eulogy for the Long, Intimate Email
JULY 11, 2015
By TEDDY WAYNE
When I started college in 1997, I got my first email account, as did most of my peers. Over the next four years, I sent and received countless rambling letters to friends, both off and on campus, a habit that persisted for a decade or so after graduation.
Now I can't remember the last time I wrote or read an email of more than four or five meaty, intimate paragraphs. I can chalk up some of my letter-writing decline to my age and profession: I have a (somewhat) smaller appetite these days for Knausgaardian navel-gazing, and expend more energy writing for work.
My decreased reliance on personal email, however, may correspond with global trends. According to the Radicati Group, a technology marketing firm, business email users now send and receive an average of 122 messages per day, up from 110 in 2010. Sealing and opening all those virtual envelopes takes a toll: A 2012 report from McKinsey found that workers spent 28 percent of their day on email.
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While the numbers cannot account for how many emails are personal, it stands to reason that few sent on business accounts are — and that people are often too exhausted from the relentless inundation to compose meaningful letters.
"I very rarely get a long email from someone," said John Freeman, a literary critic and the author of the nonfiction book "The Tyranny of E-Mail." He compared the current era, in which "everyone is overwhelmed" by his or her inbox, with his time after college in the late '90s, "when people still did write long emails" and "there was something exhilarating," he said, about the upstart free technology that enabled connectivity with anyone.
If there was a golden age of the epistolary personal email, it most likely started in this period and ended sometime in the late aughts.
Electronic mail can trace its origins to academic and military initiatives in the 1960s, though it didn't enter the mainstream until the mid-'90s, with AOL Mail (1992), Microsoft HoTMaiL (its original styling, in 1996) and Yahoo Mail (1997). Broadband access, available on most college campuses and infiltrating homes around this time, helped make it more widespread.
In the Clinton-Bush years, email was a tool for substantive dialogue. Cellphones weren't ubiquitous until the 2000s, and according to a report from Nielsen, text messages didn't surpass phone calls until 2007. Long-distance calling remained expensive. Social media was not yet widely used. Paranoia over hacked, leaked or surveilled emails was low. Sending letters by postal mail had been an antiquated practice for some time. And, as the Radicati numbers indicate, work-related email and "graymail" notifications from companies were far less intensive.
The nonstop deluge of professional emails has trained us to ignore messages irrelevant to us (or, often, delete them without even reading). Other easily dismissed digital communication — texts, tweets, Instagrams — have also dulled our response skills. If it's fully permissible to trash upon receipt an intraoffice email from human resources, it seems fine to blow off a friend's check-in (or to reply curtly). Fifteen years ago, this would have been considered rude. But now, Mr. Freeman said, even people who don't work in film "know what the 'L.A. no' is: that silence is a reply."
Still, many feel anxious hacking away the weeds of their email folders. Emma Allen, 27, estimated she receives around 200 work missives a day in her position on the editorial staff of The New Yorker. "If I don't have zero emails in both my personal and work inboxes, I can't sleep at night," she said.
As a prophylaxis against insomnia, Ms. Allen curtails friendly email exchanges. "If you get into a long email game, you each write back and then you owe them, and you can't do this slash-and-burn with emails, which I feel like I do all day and night," she said. "My mother's always sending me 900-word emails with 15 logistical questions. When I open one from her, I have a panic attack."
There may be more to Ms. Allen's resistance than her demanding job and a maternal excess; perhaps she was simply born too late to become attached to email. She first got a personal account in high school, but said she has consistently engaged in lengthy emails with only one friend. By the time she arrived in college, in 2006, texting and social media had begun to conquer email.
"When something happens to me, I've already told everyone over 16 different modes of communication," she said.
Yet even members of the older generation have curbed their long email output. "Among us AARP-ers, emails have gotten much shorter but, if anything, more numerous: confirmations, cancellations, etc.," said Daniel Menaker, 73, a writer and longtime book editor and publisher who has also worked on The New Yorker's editorial staff, albeit in an email-less era before Ms. Allen's time. (Based on how many personal emails she deleted — more than 31,000 — Hillary Clinton may agree with his assessment on quantity.)
"People of my age tend to use the phone, reflexively, more than younger people do," he continued. "It's habit. My kids will respond to a text sooner than an email and both of those much sooner than a phone message."
When younger people do compose emails, it tends to be on a tiny keyboard, with error-prone autocorrect, lowering literary standards. "It's not often I'm sitting at my computer responding," Ms. Allen said.
Continue reading the main storyRecent Comments
Abram Muljana
12 hours agoAnswer me now: Phone call - preferably cell phoneAnswer me whenever you have time: Text messageAnswer me by end of day: Short (3 paragraphs...
bud
12 hours agoSomehow Ive been able to move forward and cope. Im not loosing any sleep over the collapse of the pony express and I dont imagine ill lament...
No Chaser
15 hours agoWell, I'm going to venture off on a side road momentarily, and tell you that I still have telegrams (the proto text?) that I received in a...
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Instead of easing into a desk chair to write a long letter at a computer, we've grown accustomed to the instantly gratifying, choppy bursts of texting (frequently while walking or dictating into the phone) and instant messaging.
As Nicholas Carr has argued in his book "The Shallows," smartphones and the Internet have harmed our ability to sustain attention, a theory Mr. Freeman seconds.
"With the smartphone, you're toggling between so many applications," Mr. Freeman said. "If you just back up 30, 40 years and think about a person at a desk with a typewriter and a phone that doesn't ring that often and mail that comes in twice a day, there are so many forms of distraction now. People are becoming more reactive, and within that context, the concentration required to write a longer, thoughtful email isn't around."
It was easier even at the turn of the 21st century, when the Internet was primarily text-based; about the best audiovisual entertainment you could hope for was a 3-D rendered animation of a dancing baby. Tabbed browsing didn't become a function of the Mozilla browser until 2002, and of Internet Explorer only in 2005. Before then, running more than one app simultaneously required opening additional windows, which are less disruptive than an array of enticing tabs at the top of the screen.
Now, hunger to hear from others can often be sated by bite- and byte-size portions of a thousand different petits fours from acquaintances' status updates, rather than email's intimate candlelit dinner for two. As Ms. Allen said, "If you have the curiosity to get the vague outlines of what a friend has been doing, you can do it by perusing Facebook."
(After the Sony hack last year, many people pointed out that their own emails no longer contain deeply personal information; what's most incriminating is their Google search history.)
The newest generation may be even more averse to email. "I have a nephew in England who's 12, and I asked for his email address, and he said he didn't have one but we could talk on Viber," Mr. Freeman said, referring to an app that lets users make free phone calls and send free texts. "He's completely leapfrogged over passing messages back and forth. There's a real shame in that because there are some things that can only be expressed in something reflective and lengthy."
But even briefer, old-fashioned correspondence with his younger relatives has proved trying.
"I send postcards to my niece and nephew," Mr. Freeman said. "They never write back."
Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels "The Love Song of Jonny Valentine" and "Kapitoil." Future Tense appears monthly.
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