David Stonehouse Features

Caught in the e-mailstrom

You know things are getting out of hand when a guy with an online newsletter pulls the plug

By David Stonehouse

There was no specific breaking point for Steve Talbott, just a simmering escalation of frustration. He was convinced he had to do something but knew the solution would be strange, even mildly disconcerting: a technology guru unplugging himself from e-mail.

He had pondered the idea for a couple of years, at times agonizing over the message it would send to his friends and to devoted readers of his online newsletter, NetFuture. But he harbours no regrets. In fact, he feels better than he has in ages.

"I feel healthier in my life and work," the upstate New York editor, author and researcher says over the phone. "It is a more relaxed, less stressful kind of work. It has actually meant a very great difference for me."

He used to spend roughly half of his nine-hour workday hunched in front of the computer, dealing with the stream of messages flowing into his in-box. The task ate at the hours, cranked up the stress and left him feeling detached from his family. Hunched over in front of the screen for so long aggravated a pinched nerve in his neck, firing up headaches.

Then he shocked his online audience with a "Why I Have Disconnected from E-mail" essay.

"There is no denying it: in our society today, the centrifugal, interrupting, distracting tendencies have gotten out of control, jerking us around with almost demonic violence," he wrote, complaining not just of e-mail but of the dominance of the Internet and television in modern life. "For me, it just happens that I came to the point where I needed
to stand firm with myself and say, in one particular regard, 'Stop!'"

Talbott is not alone in feeling overwhelmed by e-mail. Its escalating use is creating a new stress all its own, lengthening our days and giving a cold, impersonal edge to our work through its seemingly unrelenting demand for time and attention. Sure, it's a tool we would
find it hard to do without. But e-mail, the experts say, is being overused and abused, clogging in-boxes everywhere.

Some people use it as a weapon, firing off messages without a thought for the usual conventions of politeness, seemingly forgetting there is a person on the other end. Time wasted on e-mail is racking up huge costs for companies while creating a new set of demands for instant reaction.

E-stress and how to handle it is just now emerging as an issue. Companies are hiring consultants to instruct staff on how to deal with the endless flow of messages productively, business management experts are composing lists of e-mail etiquette rules and university professors are studying the emerging downsides of e-mail.

Ray Friedman, a professor of management at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., took on what he believes is the first-ever study of conflict escalation in e-mail -- thanks, in no small measure, to a nasty experience of his own.

He got involved in an e-mail exchange with a journal editor over an article he had submitted. What started out as a minor disagreement over how it was to appear in the journal quickly escalated to the point where the editor sharply declared their relationship "over."

Friedman declines to go into more detail for fear this might stir up trouble with the editor again. But the incident left him wondering if things would have got so far out of hand if the two had met face-to-face.

When he found out that colleagues had had similar unpleasant experiences with e-mail, he began delving into the problem. The results were made public earlier this year.

Friedman found that people tend to forget normal social conventions, such as politeness, when hurriedly dealing with e-mail, easily misinterpreting messages because of the starkness of the written word.

He also discovered it is easy to pile on criticism in reply to an e-mail snub. If we feel threatened by a heavy-handed e-mail, we respond in heavy-handed fashion. Before we know it, the exchange has escalated like the Cold War -- all because we aren't seeing or hearing the person on the other end.

"On e-mail you can lose that immediate contact," Friedman says. "When you're talking to someone, you might think it's rude to interrupt. It's actually pretty useful because often, when people are heading down a path that is not productive or is starting to get you angry, then you can cut them off and signal they are heading in the wrong direction and
get it corrected before it has gone on too long."

It doesn't help either that an e-mail is right there, on the record, in black-and-white.

"If somebody sends you a stupid e-mail, instead of just correcting them and joking about it, you sit there and you call it up on your computer 80 times in the day, as you're steamed about the person, and get yourself more and more convinced what an idiot that person is."

He believes e-mail stress and conflict are just now becoming recognized as problems we need to come to grips with.

"People are using more and more e-mail. They have to become more adept at it. They are just naive, jumping into e-mail for everything. Hopefully, people will realize that they are a little bit more at risk."

Steve Talbott felt the demands of e-mail were disconnecting him from real communication with people. Last summer's declaration that he was cutting himself adrift created a stir among his readers.

He didn't help himself by giving his essay a bold headline, proclaiming how he was "disconnecting" from e-mail. The headline prompted some to overlook his explanation that he still has an account but will no longer be a slave to it.

Now people who send Talbott messages get an automatic reply indicating their notes will eventually be read by him or an assistant but saying the best way to reach him is by phone or old-fashioned letter.

Some people's reactions have been startling.

"Your behaviour strikes me as cowardly and hypocritical," declared one reader. Another announced: "Sorry to sound caustic, but this reminds me of a quote from Samuel Beckett: 'Man blames his shoes for the faults of his feet.'"

Talbott was uncharacteristically combative in response.

"I'm in a mood to meet anger with anger. What in hell's name are these people trying to convict me of?" wrote Talbott, author of the 1995 book The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst.

"Look at the culture of e-mail. It's all right to slap people around via e-mail; it's all right to send careless, half-decipherable messages for no good reason; it's all right to contribute wholesale and without any thoughtful hesitation to the message overload of your fellows; it's all right to fire off responses without having read the message you are responding to," he wrote in the newsletter.

"Use e-mail as vacuously and irresponsibly as you wish, and you are at least exercising one of the glorious privileges of the digital age. But back away from the medium itself in an effort to find your own responsible balance, and you call down the scorn of the technically enlightened upon yourself."

Reached by phone, Talbott explains his belief that there is something about the computer screen that draws people in and is reluctant to let go.

"Clearly, individuals get sucked into it in an unbalanced way," he says. " Apart from those individuals who may become extremely unbalanced, there is also clearly a very broad problem where a good percentage of people involved in online communication find that they are being pressured by e-mail, thrown off balance to some degree by it."

He is hoping he will start something of a trend. Or, as he puts it, "I hope many people make a decision to hold a reasonable balance in their lives."

Christina Cavanaugh, a professor in the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario, began researching the burdens of e-mail after students in her executive MBA classes constantly complained about it.

"There is a level of stress that e-mail creates all on its own -- and not because we have e-mail, because nobody could do without it. It's some of the non-productive ways in which we are using e-mail that are causing stress," Cavanaugh says.

And it's not just the sheer volume of e-mail -- the 80, 90 or more messages a day that are becoming the norm. It's the aggravation.

"I use the analogy of driving to work in the morning and somebody cuts you off and you feel something -- there is a little bit of emotion there, you have to make a decision as to what are you going to do about this," she says.

"But the emotion stays. It doesn't go away as soon as the car is gone.

"I feel that's sometimes what e-mail does to us when we get certain pieces of spam or we get certain annoying e-mails, like a person who sends a response back that is one letter, like an O or a K or a Y or an N."

And that emotion -- the irritation or anger -- isn't the only stress.In a study to be released this summer, Cavanaugh expects to report that our devotion to e-mail is chewing through an extra hour a day, compared with the time most people expended on it two years ago.

"There is a corporate cost to that," she warns, "and it's millions of dollars every year."

By conducting 50 detailed interviews with a wide cross-section of office workers throughout North America, she has found that dealing with electronic messages eats up about two-and-a-half hours a day. And plenty of that, she suggests, is unnecessary.

When she asked 10 middle managers to track their e-mails last year, she discovered that nearly half of the messages were junk or notes with little relevance.

Those two small studies demonstrate that some of us are spending a lot of time on work of little value. Oddly, some wear this like a badge of honour, bragging about the volume of e-mail they have to contend with.

"People speak of the amount of e-mail they receive almost like war wounds," says Mark Ellwood, a Toronto productivity consultant and author of Cut the Glut of E-mail.

"They're like, 'I got 200 when I got back from vacation.' It's almost like a perverse pride people take in the amount of e-mails they receive. It almost seems like a badge of popularity.

"I don't think you are popular if you get 200 e-mails. It's just that you've allowed a lot of people to send you this stuff."

And the problem is only going to get worse before it gets better.

Richard Rosenberg, a computer science professor at the University of B.C., says increasing Internet bandwidth is only going to make it possible to send and receive greater amounts of e-mail.

As people get angrier about the flood of unnecessary e-mail, he predicts there will be growing pressure on governments to enact laws that will curb nuisances like Internet spam and fraud.

But while he can understand why some people might get so frustrated that they consider cutting themselves off from e-mail, he can't see the trend catching on.

"It's not clear to me what the substitute for that is," says Rosenberg, author of The Social Impact of Computers. "Are we going to go back to telephone calls and play telephone tag, leaving messages?"

David Stonehouse last wrote for Mix on the adventurer Ernest Shackleton.