‘The everyday receives our daily inattention’
Georges Bataille1
There is one habit that we all seem to like doing while desk-dining. Surveys of internet traffic have suggested that the peak time in the working day for checking and answering emails is lunchtime.2 This is not very surprising: the nature of email means that it can be left until there is a lull in the activity of the office, and it is also an amorphous, many-headed beast that merges work time and free time. Email allows you to sort out your office diary, your personal life and your daily chores all at once. Since having an email address has only been de rigueur in Britain since the mid1990s, any office worker over thirty-five should remember a time before the inbox ruled their lives in this way. However did we do without this instantaneous messaging system, which brilliantly obliterates time zones, eliminates ‘phone tag’, and allows us to send everything from one-line hellos to book-length documents with a single mouse click? Hardly anyone can remember. The rapid success of email has not made us more aware of its history – if anything, it has produced a kind of collective amnesia about the work revolution it produced. Email has vastly expanded the number of people who write to each other, but these people have learned how to use it through trial and error. It has created new ways of thinking, feeling and relating to others – but not ones of which we are usually aware. To begin to understand the nature of the problem, it is worth thinking first about the daily habit it usurped: letter-writing.
Letter-writing manuals, which emerged in the medieval era and boomed in Britain from the eighteenth century onwards, served as guides to writing for the barely literate, and introductions to the rules of polite society for the aspirational. There were Byzantine, constantly shifting rules about how to open and sign off a letter, depending on one’s social status and familiarity with the recipient. The most cumbersome sign-offs (‘I have the honour, Sir, to remain your obedient servant’) originated in the sixteenth century. Two centuries later, however, people began using ‘&c’ at the end of their letters as a substitute for this stock phraseo logy. The number of sign-offs, each with its own specific meaning, proliferated. ‘Yours’, for example, evolved as a halfway house for people who were unsure whether to write the formal ‘Yours sincerely’ or the effusive ‘Yours ever’. The tweaking of rules and the improvisations of individual letter-writers anticipated some of the strategies of emailers. Until the penny post arrived in 1840, the letter’s recipient had to pay for the postage. So it could be bad manners to send either a very short or a very long letter (since extra sheets of paper cost more). You could save space by using abbreviations – not unlike the shorthand used in contemporary email and text messaging.3 In the mid-nineteenth century, when the post began to be delivered by train several times a day, letters were often as brief and trivial as emails. A city gent might send a note to his suburban home at lunchtime, announcing to his wife that he would be late home that evening4 – the equivalent of people today declaiming that they are ‘on the train’. The postcard, which arrived in the late nineteenth century, also anticipated the informality of email and was similarly laid-back about spelling, syntax and conjunctions (‘Hving wndrfl time’).
As the rules loosened up further in the first half of the twentieth century, there was a long debate about whether to retain the wordier conventions. A common topic to write to the editor of The Times about, for example, was how to write to the editor of The Times. One correspondent, signing himself simply ‘Victorian’, complained about the growing habit of writing ‘Yours, &c.’ in such letters, ‘a deplorable concession to the slovenly made by those who are not slovenly’.5 ‘Another Victorian’ protested that ‘“Yours sincerely” from some individual of whom one has never heard is highly irritating.’6 Other people would conduct surveys of hundreds of letters published in the newspaper, and write to the editor about the percentage of correspondents who had signed off ‘Yours faithfully’ or ‘Yours truly’, and had preceded this with ‘I am’ or ‘I remain’.7
One form of address now common in emails between strangers, and which excited more ire than any other, was ‘Dear [first and second name]’. In the early 1950s, the linguist Alan Ross identified this ‘non-U’ (non-upper-class) convention as an invention of intellectuals in the 1930s.8 Nancy Mitford complained that ‘this unspeakable usage sometimes occurs in letters – Dear XX – which, in silence, are quickly torn up, by me.’9 In 1962, an MP wrote to The Times to protest at being addressed in such a way: ‘You, Sir, once in the thirties, used your great power to stop laundries from putting pins into the shirts they had cleaned. Will you now thunder again to choke this form of address which I find odious?’10 Just as the right people are supposed simply to ‘know’ the correct form, it was rarely explained why this salutation was so offensive, on a par with the despicable practice of putting pins in shirts, but presumably it was to do with the assumption of first-name familiarity by one’s social inferiors.
It is easy to laugh at these snobberies. With its reputation for informality and spontaneity, however, email threatened to throw out centuries of letter-writing etiquette and put nothing in its place. The problem was that no one was quite sure what sort of message an email was: it was somewhere between a letter, a telex, a fax and a phone call. For a long time it was the very junior partner of these other forms of communication. A Cold War baby, email began as part of efforts by the United States Defense Department to create a dispersed electronic network that could survive a nuclear bomb dropping on a mainframe computer. But for several decades after the computer engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the first email from one machine to another in 1971 (by using the @ sign as a way of differentiating between their locations) its wider commercial success hung in the balance. ‘Electronic mail has been on the way for ten years now and is expected soon, a delivery record of which Queen Victoria’s postal service would be thoroughly ashamed,’ complained one British journalist in 1991.11
Even after its commercial introduction in the UK in the mid-1980s, email struggled to compete with the telex and the fax. Telex, which had been running commercially since 1932, was antiquated and expensive: a typed message at one end turned into a pattern of holes punched on to reams of ticker tape at the other end, and even a simple message could take up metres of tape. But telex usage was still expanding well into the 1980s, and early email services allowed you to send an email that came out as a telex at the other end (and vice versa).12 At this time the fax machine, not email, looked like the future. In 1986 there were only 86,000 fax machines in the UK; two years later there were a quarter of a million.13 At the same time, the largest email system, British Telecom’s Telecom Gold, had only 80,000 users.14 There were other, much smaller email systems, run by firms like Mercury set up in the wake of the Thatcher government’s ending of BT’s monopoly. Until a wave of industry takeovers and agreed protocols in the early 1990s, though, all the software systems were incompatible with one another. If you picked the wrong system, you could soon end up friendless, with no one left to write to.
Computer systems in the 1980s were primitive and too much email traffic slowed up the system, so companies would discourage excessive use among their employees. This was always likely to be a difficult area because the ease and confidentiality of email made it an instant ally of the frivolous, illicit message. Computer programmers in California in the 1970s were rumoured to use email to set up their dope deals, and one of the first transatlantic emails, sent by Len Kleinrock in 1973, asked the recipient, Larry Roberts, to retrieve an electric razor that he had left behind at a computer conference.15 In the 1980s, though, this kind of trivia was frowned upon: in 1986, Hewlett Packard urged users of its in-house system not to email each other Christmas greetings.16 But the biggest disadvantage of email in this period was that, unlike a fax or telex, it gave no indication that it had arrived – a problem if you only received one or two messages a week. Some email systems would offer a radio paging service to warn you of a message arriving, but that could double the cost.17
Because email co-existed, and still co-exists, with these other forms of communication – letter, telex, fax – users were unsure whether to make up new rules of etiquette or adapt old ones. Email clearly borrowed its header format (To, From, Subject, etc.) from the internal memo, which first emerged in the business world in the 1870s.18 But it had a more informal character attuned to the less overtly hierarchical organisations of the 1980s and 1990s – a sort of electronic equivalent of the open-plan office. Executives no longer asked their secretaries to take down a letter, type it up and sign it ‘per procurationem’ (by proxy); they emailed their underlings, who replied in kind. Email had a New World confidence that invidious distinctions of class and status could simply be swept away by straightforwardness. A 1992 American guide to email urged users to ignore the social niceties of conventional mail: ‘E-mail is supposed to be fast, tit-for-tat communication. You ask. I answer. You ask. I answer. You’re not supposed to watch the sun set, listen to the surf pound the sun-bleached sand, and sip San Miguel beer as Paco dives for abalone while you craft your e-mail.’19
But the absence of an obvious email protocol was not necessarily liberating. It could make those lower down the office hierarchy more uneasy, worried about being either too formal or too casual. In the early days of email, most British office workers simply mimicked the etiquette of the formal business letter, beginning with ‘Dear Mr …’ and closing with ‘Yours sincerely’. Such sticklers were likely to baulk at including the original message in the reply, on the grounds that you would never reply to a letter by writing at the bottom of it. But more confident souls soon dispensed with such hangovers from snail mail, and even circumvented salutations and sign-offs altogether, batting emails back and forth as though they were having a telephone conversation.
Another uncertainty was how well-written an email needed to be. Until the arrival of Microsoft Outlook in the late 1990s, it was hard to word-process and spell-check emails. In the earliest email systems it was even difficult to move the cursor, so you had to leave the typos or start all over again. Some business cultures not only tolerated spelling mistakes in emails, but even admired them as a sign that the sender was too busy to worry about such fripperies. Typing in e e cummings style, unpunctuated and in lower case, had a slightly macho, no-time-to-press-the-shift-key quality. In the 1990s, an American academic, David Owens, spent a year at a California research and development firm which was a model of team-led egalitarianism. When he looked at a sample of 30,000 email messages sent within the company over a four-year period, however, he found that senior figures tended to send much shorter, abrupt messages with the poorest grammar and spelling.20 Email might be quick, easy and open to all – but it still conveyed silent status signals.
Email occupied a confusing middle ground between the premeditation of a letter and the expressiveness of a phone call. To compensate for the absence of verbal intonation in email, early users of message boards used ‘emoticons’ and ‘smileys’ to denote things like ‘only joking’ and ‘happy’, and acronyms such as LOL (‘laugh out loud’, sometimes embarrassingly mistaken for ‘lots of love’). But according to a survey by the linguist David Crystal, this kind of cool, Californian-style shorthand never caught on among the majority of British email users, particularly in the world of work.21 Over time, as people got used to the technology, a sort of tacit protocol did develop. The email message began with ‘Dear’ or ‘Hi’ followed by the name (usually the first name, although when addressing a stranger the rather prim ‘if I may’ sometimes followed in brackets). The sign-off was something like ‘Best’ or ‘Cheers’. Rules of grammar and punctuation were relaxed, and non-geeky abbreviations like BTW (by the way) permitted. But certain things remained infra dig, like typing in capital letters – the norm on telex, but regarded as a form of virtual shouting on email.
The growth of email did not dispense with the fondness that many felt for the material form of the letter, particularly if it bore the idiosyncratic imprint of the person who had written it. The English upper classes, who invented most of the rules of letter-writing, were particularly reluctant to let go of the handwritten letter. Ever since Nancy Mitford ruled that sending letters by airmail suggested an ‘undue haste’ which was definitely ‘non-U’,22 the guardians of etiquette had been fighting a rearguard action against soulless business correspondence. In their 1982 Sloane Ranger Handbook, Ann Barr and Peter York noted the upper-class love of personal ‘thank you’ letters and other notes sent to friends as a way of defying the impersonality of business letters. Sloanes liked the smell and texture of watermarked paper and Mont Blanc fountain pens, and the eccentricities of handwriting, liberally sprinkled with underlinings and exclamation marks for emphasis and flourish. The ultimate expression of this sensualism was the ‘stiffie’, the card with engraved lettering (‘Sloane Braille’) announcing a wedding or an ‘at home’, displayed like a trophy on the mantelpiece.23
But this system of etiquette was thrown into crisis by email. Email’s software programs gave little opportunity for personal expression and they jumbled up the most private messages with workaday memos. Eventually even the guardians of good form at Debrett’s had to accept the inevitable lure of the inbox.24 But the nostalgia for the personal letter remained – and not merely in the best circles. There is a natural inclination to assign different levels of importance to correspondence which the more old-fashioned technologies exploit. With the arrival of fax, for example, the telex industry claimed that fax was fine for everyday usage but really important messages had to be signalled by their noisy arrival at a telex terminal.25 Later on, as email traffic expanded, it was the fax, or better still a letter by first-class post, which assumed this kind of rarity value.
From the beginning, email software programs drew on this nostalgia for the post, mimicking the look and vocabulary of snail mail. America Online, which launched in the US in 1993, was successful because it offered novice users a series of familiar features, including a friendly voice when you logged on saying, ‘You’ve got mail’. When AOL launched in Britain in 1996, subscribers instead heard Joanna Lumley’s breathy English voice saying, ‘You’ve got post’, later updated to ‘You’ve got email’. In almost all email programs, new messages are denoted by an unopened envelope symbol, read messages by an opened one, and messages sit in your ‘inbox’ or ‘mailbox’. Email has retained an atavistic attraction to the iconography of the letter. (The current Times Letters page, still the bush telegraph of the Establishment, advises that ‘we take letters by e-mail’, which suggests a similar residual attachment.)
However apologetically email usurped the letter, by the end of the century it was the dominant form of mail in the UK. ‘If you have no e-mail address you’re a walking piece of history, as out of date as papyrus,’ decreed one journalist in 1999.26 Perhaps the most significant effect of the triumph of email has been the sort of personal–professional spillage that upper-class etiquette most feared, in which non-work intrudes into working time and vice versa. Email is provided free by employers to their staff and so can lead to unauthorised spreading of gossip and jokes, the sort of surreptitious fun on the company’s time that the French call la perruque (which literally means a ‘wig’). But the opposite has happened as well: work has invaded other areas of our lives. Unlike the morning post, email arrives at any time of the day or night. In this sense, it is like many of the newer communications technologies, such as answering machines and mobile phones, which promise to help us organise our time but also make us permanently available to others. Just like working through your lunch break, though, the tyranny of email has been socio-psychological rather than directly coercive. No one forces you to log on. If you have a thick skin, you can ignore email more or less indefinitely. Given that universities pioneered the use of email, it is ironic that they seem to have such a disproportionate number of these people (usually male) who never check their emails or do so only on random occasions.
To be fair to these e-fuseniks, you never know what an email contains until you open it, so there is no foolproof way of sorting out relevant emails from the ever-expanding morass of spam – both commercial and occupational. The ‘reply all’ and ‘cc’ functions allow work emails to be disseminated willy-nilly. Higher-ups can use them to proselytise, motivate and keep underlings ‘in the loop’; subordinates can copy in their superiors to show they are keeping busy. The increase in back-covering, cheerleading or simply redundant emails has inspired what I call ‘look-at-me mails’, which have exclamation marks or red flags next to them denoting ‘high importance’. Look-at-me mails have a slightly admonitory tone, as if implying that we are in the habit of ignoring all our other messages. But the growing use of flags for messages which are neither urgent nor important surely suffers from the law of diminishing returns, particularly since no one sends emails marked ‘low priority’. I wonder what attention-grabbing devices emails will need in future (flashing lights? drum rolls?) just to inform us that someone’s wallet has been found in the toilets.
Since around the turn of the millennium, there have been countless press articles in Britain about the time workers spend dealing with emails. These articles take a fairly standard form: they use surveys by internet measurement companies to estimate how many minutes or hours a day the average worker spends dealing with emails, how many messages they receive each day or year, or how many billions of emails are sent around the world each day or year. Of course, this last statistic is always going to seem like a big number – but in retrospect some of the numbers in these surveys do not seem so large. As recently as 2001, a MORI survey found that Britain’s company directors were ‘struggling to stay on top of their inboxes’, with a quarter of them receiving ‘more than 30 e-mails a day’ – a not especially mind-boggling number in hindsight.27 These surveys often come up with widely differing results. Email traffic is hard to quantify not only because it is virtual but also because so many messages are sent within intranets (private networks within organi-sations) rather than across the internet. In any case, the statistics are of dubious value because they do not measure how useful all this email activity is, or to what extent it has displaced other time-consuming activities, such as fielding phone calls or answering letters.
Email surveys are a classic example of how, according to the sociologist Joel Best, the media use statistics – by making a fetish of rising numbers and then turning them into ‘numeric statements about social life’,28 the statement in this case being that email is spiralling out of control. Workers are suffering from ‘mail rage … crack[ing] under the strain of handling their ever-expanding in-box’.29 Others are experiencing ‘inbox dread’, the sick feeling you get before you log on to deal with an insurmountable mountain of emails. Since around half of all office workers are said regularly to email colleagues less than ten feet away, the campaign against email infoglut has even become part of the wider war against obesity.30 In October 2005, Sport England encouraged employers to ban internal emails and get staff walking round the office in an ‘E-mail free Friday’ scheme, part of the ‘Everyday Sport Office Games’.31 A less-noticed effect of the proliferation of emails has been a return to the proxy forms of office correspondence briefly banished by email at the end of the last century. Many bosses are now unreachable via their inboxes, using ‘e-secretaries’ to filter out unwanted contact.32
The electronic message has not killed off more traditional ways of working. New technologies never arrive in a vacuum; they mould themselves around the habits we already have. Email was supposed finally to usher in that perennial chimera, ‘the paperless office’. One journalist predicted in 1986 that ‘the partnership of word processor and e-mail almost eliminates the need for paper’.33 In fact, a recent study suggests that email has increased paper consumption by about 40 per cent. Rather than photocopy documents to distribute to colleagues, we distribute through email and then expect them all to print it – which is why the increase in printer sales has outweighed the increase in photocopier sales about thirty-fold since the late 1980s.34 Copying is giving way to what is known in the trade as ‘MOPying’, producing ‘multiple original prints’. It seems that, whatever the advantages of virtuality, you can’t beat the portability and navigability of paper.
Email may speed up certain tasks, but it also provides ample evidence of C. Northcote Parkinson’s time-honoured law that ‘work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion’.35 Email makes both meaningful and meaningless communication easier, and allows us to conduct electronic conversations that could be more quickly and efficiently conducted by the old-fashioned technology of talking. When I am asked for the nth time at work, ‘Did you get my email?’, I politely refrain from pointing out that this question defeats one of the main purposes of email, which is to bypass conversation. Emails have not dispensed with the need for human interaction, or the bottomless capacity of work to generate time-wasting and redundancy.
The editors of the Oxford Book of Letters point out that ‘it is hard to imagine an anthology of faxes, and harder still to foresee an Oxford Book of E-mail’.36 But if future historians of daily life did manage to retrieve information from obsolescent email servers, they might find that today’s trite memo is tomorrow’s historical curio. In 2000, the artist Tom Phillips produced an engrossing history of the last century simply by reprinting thousands of postcards and their messages.37 Like the lines scribbled on the backs of postcards, email messages are batted off without a thought, written in a nondescript, functional style, full of truisms and clichés (‘wish you were here…/thanks for yours …’), and preserve in writing something that might normally only be spoken, and thus lost to posterity. Assuming they can hack into my account, those future historians may come to thank virtual hoarders like me, who pointlessly retain old emails. Every so often I receive curt messages from computer services informing me that my inbox is full and that my account will be suspended until I empty it. Half-heartedly, I undertake a mailbox detox. But I can’t quite bring myself to delete all those little pieces of trivia about routine lives: lost student essays, missed meetings, out-of-order photocopiers, broken vending machines. In time, like Phillips’s postcard messages, they will make for a riveting historical record. All human life is in our inboxes.