CHAPTER 14
EMAIL AND THE POWER OF THE CHECK-IN
In 1971, a thirty-year-old computer scientist named Ray Tomlinson, working in the outskirts of Cambridge, Massachusetts, took on an interesting assignment. Working at the government contractors Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), near Fresh Pond, he was asked, roughly, to find something that might make the newly operational Internet useful to people.
In 1969, the earliest version of the Internet (called the ARPANET) had connected fifteen of the nation’s leading research networks, including those at universities like UCLA, Stanford, as well as ones in the commercial sector, like IBM, and BBN, where Tomlinson worked. Connecting all of these nodes with one “universal” network was itself a technical achievement that has been widely celebrated. But a computer network alone is like a railroad without trains—it isn’t inherently useful. They had built it—but who would come?
The Internet’s lack of utility was, in fact, a serious danger to its future throughout the 1970s, a very precarious moment in its history. Fortunately, as a government project, it didn’t actually have to make any money (had it been required to, there would have been no Internet). But eventually the Internet would have to prove of some use to someone, or face defunding.
Tomlinson, a classic tinkerer in the style of the early programmers, fooled around with a few ideas, with the help of two early computers in his office; even though right next to each other, they were connected through the early Internet. His main idea was to build some means by which his machines could send files to each other (a predecessor to what became known as the File Transfer Protocol). But as he tinkered, Tomlinson began to think not just about the machines but about the people using them. People could be awfully hard to reach by telephone, he mused. That’s when he had a clever idea: why not modify his file transfer program to send messages? There was no grand vision; when asked later why he came up with email, he answered, “Mostly because it seemed like a neat idea.”1
It happened that the large computers in use at the time already had primitive messaging systems, designed to allow users of the same machine to leave one another notes. Tomlinson merely modified his file transfer program so that people all over the networks could append text files, or messages, to other people’s “mailbox” files. By his own description, the invention of email was nothing monumental. “Just a minor addition to the protocol” is how he later described the work that would change how everyone communicates.
The very first email messages were sent by Tomlinson to himself. Unlike the first telegraph transmission—Samuel Morse had famously sent the message “What hath God wrought?”—there wasn’t much to the first email. “Most likely the first message was QWERTYUIOP or something similar,” Tomlinson remembers. In later interviews he would explicitly deny that it was even that distinctive. As he told NPR in 2009, “The first e-mail is completely forgettable. And, therefore, forgotten.”2
Tomlinson’s final clever little hack was to use the @ sign to distinguish emails arriving from remote computers, so the format was “Tomlinson@remotemachine” (the .com and the like would be invented later). The choice was happenstance: as Tomlinson later told the Smithsonian, he’d been looking around for something to use when he noticed the @, poised above “P” on his Model 33 teletype terminal.3 “I was mostly looking for a symbol that wasn’t used much…I could have used an equal sign, but that wouldn’t have made much sense.” That the @ key was even on the computer keyboard was itself rather by happenstance, too. Its origins are obscure (one theory suggests it is an “a” placed within an “e” and an abbreviation for “each at”); it was sometimes used in commerce to designate the price at which each unit was being sold.
Tomlinson’s own assessment of his invention was modest: a small but useful hack, hardly something that fulfilled BBN’s assignment. But within a year, email had, to use a later vernacular, gone viral and given the Internet arguably its most powerful reason to exist, namely, not just to connect machines, but people. Email endowed the network with a social and human purpose—and in that sense, a soul. By 1973, a survey of network usage revealed that 75 percent of capacity was consumed not by, say, the transfer of important research documents but by email traffic.4 To use another phrase coined later, email was the Internet’s first killer app—the first program that might justify the cost of the entire network.
If email perhaps saved the Internet from a premature death, it also foretold its eventual significance. Its technical achievement would always remain the connection of different networks into one universal net. But its lasting importance to the individual would be the ability it conferred on him to connect with virtually anyone, whether for business, social reasons, or whatever else. As the content of those connections proved to be nothing less than astonishing in its potential variety, the Internet would begin devouring human attention. Together with its eventual portal, the personal computer, it would steadily grow into the greatest collector of human attention since the invention of television. That, however, was decades away, as if in another galaxy.
In the early 1970s, Stephen Lukasik, a physicist, was director of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), then the world’s main funder of important computer research. But Lukasik was also, in one particular way, more like a twenty-first-century person than anyone we’ve met so far. Here’s why: everywhere Lukasik went in the conduct of his business, he carried with him his “device”—a “portable terminal,” manufactured by Texas Instruments. Lukasik’s terminal was a massive thirty-pound piece of hardware, a sort of giant typewriter capable of speaking to a telephone. But by lugging it around, he could do something most of us take for granted: check for emails wherever he went (provided he could find a telephone to connect to). As such, Lukasik may have been history’s first true email addict.
Stated differently, Lukasik was arguably the first to develop that little habit that consumes the attention of so many of us—the “check-in”—the impulse triggered by the intrusive thought that whatever else one is doing: “I need to check my email.” The check-in would eventually become a widespread attentional habit; it would go on to power AOL, Facebook, Twitter, and various other future attention merchants built around various technologies and business models. No other has compelled so many minds with such regularity—regularity that has the feel of a compulsion, of a mental itch constantly in need of being scratched.
Just how the check-in ritual would come to make such a variety of attention merchants viable will become clearer as we see the computer go from Lukasik’s thirty-pound terminal to the desktop to the laptop and the smartphone. For now, suffice it to say that among a tiny few, something had been born that would in time be comparable only to prime time in importance among attention rituals.
Just what was it about the check-in experience of email users—or for that matter of chat room visitors, and the later social media variants—that made people keep coming back for more? Each of these activities, it turns out, may effect a form of what is called “operant conditioning.”
We have already met John Watson, the psychologist-turned-advertising-executive, who pioneered the idea that humans are essentially like any other animals, reacting predictably to external stimuli. Over the 1930s, a more famous scientist, B. F. Skinner, would take the idea further. He regarded free will to be an illusion and argued that our behavior is a fabric of responses to past stimuli, in particular the rewards or punishments that any behavior attracts. Understood this way, all animal behavior developed through a learning process he called “operant conditioning,” whereby some actions are reinforced by positive consequences (rewards), others discouraged by negative ones (punishments). To demonstrate what he meant, he built the so-called Skinner Box or “operant conditioning chamber,” wherein he subjected animals to various consequences and observed their conditioning. For instance, by giving a pigeon a food pellet whenever it pecked at a button, Skinner conditioned the pigeon to peck the button so as to be fed. He also showed that pigeons could be conditioned to do things like turn in a circle (by reinforcing left turns), or even play competitive Ping-Pong.*
According to Skinner, we, too, in most aspects of our lives, are like pigeons pecking at a button to receive little snacks. And this, according to the cognitive scientist Tom Stafford, explains the check-in impulse behind email and other online technologies. Unlike a food pellet, email isn’t always rewarding; in fact, it is often annoying (though with fewer people and less spam, it was surely more rewarding back in the 1970s). Once upon a time, there could be no new email for days at a time (few of us have that problem now). Much of what we get is uninteresting or indeed difficult to deal with. But every so often we get a message we are very glad to have. That such “rewarding” email comes unpredictably does not dim its allure or keep us from looking for it. On the contrary: as Stafford points out, the most effective way of maintaining a behavior is not with a consistent, predictable reward, but rather with what is termed “variable reinforcement”—that is, rewards that vary in their frequency or magnitude.
In experiments pioneered by Skinner and repeated over the 1970s and 1980s, psychologists demonstrated (again using pigeons in boxes) the somewhat surprising truth that behavior consistently rewarded is in fact more prone to “extinction” than behavior inconsistently rewarded. While they may be initially slower to learn the connection between deed and consequence, pigeons rewarded after an inconsistent number of pecks kept at it. As psychologist David Myers comments, “Hope springs eternal.”5
Think for a minute about activities that entrance their practitioners, like gambling, shopping, or fishing. They all, in fact, have variable and unknowable reward schedules. A slot machine that rewarded every pull or even every third would offer no thrill; and no one hunts cows for sport. But take away the certainty and the real fun begins. Likewise, Stafford argues, “checking email is a behavior that has variable interval reinforcement….Everyone loves to get an email from a friend, or some good news, or even an amusing web link.”6 It is enough to have had such an experience a few times to get you regularly fishing for it; constant checking is thus reinforced, “even if most of the time checking your email turns out to have been pointless. You still check because you never know when the reward will come.”
By this understanding, the gradual introduction of email was arguably one of history’s greatest feats of mass Skinneresque conditioning. We might imagine those first offices wired in the 1970s and 1980s as so many Skinner Boxes, ourselves as the hungry pigeons. By the 1990s, we would all learned to peck, or check email, in hope of a reward. And once created, that habit would not only open us up to all sorts of commercial possibilities, including various other Internet applications depending on the almighty power of check-in to regularly collect human attention. Of course, in the 1970s, no one imagined the commercial value of email. Well, almost no one.
In May 1978, Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager at the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), was thinking of a way to publicize the launch of a new line of advanced computers, the VAX T-series. DEC was based in Massachusetts, but Thuerk wanted to gain the attention of West Coast techies as well. So he decided to stage demonstrations in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley. But how would he get people to come?
“I looked at sending out invitations and calling all of those people,” Thuerk would recall, “but it was too hard to reach them by phone and too expensive and slow to print out invitations and send them.”7 So, fully aware that he was “pushing the envelope,” he decided to send out the world’s first mass, unsolicited email blast. Using a directory of West Coast Internet users, he and his project manager laboriously typed 393 separate email addresses into a giant header that went on for several pages.
In all caps, his email read:
DIGITAL WILL BE GIVING A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY; THE DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T….
WE INVITE YOU TO COME SEE THE 2020 AND HEAR ABOUT THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY AT THE TWO PRODUCT PRESENTATIONS WE WILL BE GIVING IN CALIFORNIA THIS MONTH. THE LOCATIONS WILL BE:
TUESDAY, MAY 9, 1978—2 PM
HYATT HOUSE (NEAR THE L.A. AIRPORT)
LOS ANGELES, CA
THURSDAY, MAY 11, 1978—2 PM
DUNFEY’S ROYAL COACH
SAN MATEO, CA….8
Unfortunately for Thuerk, the response was immediate and negative. The Pentagon wrote an email describing the blast as a “FLAGRANT VIOLATION” of federal policy. Thuerk got a call from a testy official at the Pentagon, who informed him that the Internet was for official government business only. Thuerk said someone “called me up and chewed me out. He made me promise never to do it again.”
The incident also prompted a philosophical discussion among early Internet designers as to whether advertising should be allowed on the network at all. The consensus was a clear “no.” Yet as Mark Crispin, another early scientist who detested the DEC message and saw no place for advertising, wrote: “I shudder to think about it, but I can envision junk mail being sent to [regular] people…and no way it could be prevented or stopped. I guess the ultimate solution is the command in your mail reading subsystem which deletes an unwanted message.”9
As for Thuerk, for the rest of his life he seemed to take some pride in his small moment of notoriety; he told Computerworld in 2007 that he prefers to call himself “the father of e-marketing” and also made himself available for inspirational speeches.10 At one point, he argued that he shouldn’t be blamed for the plague of spam. “You don’t blame the Wright Brothers for every flying problem.”
Thuerk was indeed history’s first spammer, and as such also an ancestor to the troll, two consistently recurring characters in the new bottom-up, people-powered attention industries. The spammer and the troll have their differences, but they have this in common—they defy social conventions to harvest attention for their own purposes. Email, until 1978, was strictly noncommercial, limited to social and business functions. Thuerk broke that unwritten rule and gained as much attention for himself as for DEC, perhaps at some cost to his reputation. But the other characteristic of the troll is not to care.
To give Thuerk his due, he did see, just as clearly as Benjamin Day or other pioneering attention merchants had, that there was value to all those eyeballs focused on the same thing. No one remarked it at the time, but the mind tended to fix on this new screen even more attentively than to television. Such a mind was therefore in the state most naturally primed for being sold something. But it would be another generation before the commercial potential of the computer would be manifest.
On the thirtieth anniversary of his email, for reasons known only to him, maybe just to be annoying, Thuerk would compose a poem:
I do not eat Green Eggs and SPAM
The Father of Email-spam I am.
I do not drink Green Beer with SPAM
The father of cyber-spam I am.
I sent the very first e-spam,
So in the Guinness Book I am.
It is the Day for Green Eggs & SPAM.
For it’s the Anniversary of the first e-spam.11
The text perhaps bears close reading, but as the saying goes, “Do not feed the trolls.”