On Email Addiction

There is an interesting and realistic account on email addiction in New York Magazine which I discovered through Roger's blog. A few quotes from people the writer spoke to about this piece. Do they resonate?

Says ABC Chairman Robert Iger, "I try to avoid turning on the computer when I wake up now, because I know if I do, I won't read my newspapers. By the time I do log on, around 6 a.m., 25 messages have accumulated from Europe and California since I last checked before going to sleep. When I get to work and sit down at my desk, there's often some document in my in-box that I need to read.

But meanwhile, the e-mails keep arriving. It really affects your attention span. All of a sudden, you find yourself turning around in your chair just to see what's there. Without thinking about it, you start answering them, and before long, 40 minutes has gone by. I now find myself purposely avoiding meetings just to handle the increasing volume of e-mail."

"When you log on, you feel like you're in touch with everything that's going on in the world," says Judith Regan, publisher of Regan Books. "But what you really are is out of touch -- literally. There is no touching anymore. ... Here I am, sitting at home in front of my computer answering e-mail (on a Sunday) at ten in the morning when I should be in bed with a handsome guy making love."

"E-mail may be the rudest form of communication yet invented," says Nathan Myhrvold, until recently the chief technology officer at Microsoft. E-mail eliminates tone of voice, body language, and the sort of social cues and contexts that make it possible to distinguish between different messages intended by the same words. In technological terms, e-mail has a limited emotional bandwidth."