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Overview
Sometime in the mid-1990s we began, often with some trepidation, to enroll for a service that promised to connect us--electronically and efficiently--to our friends and lovers, our bosses and clients. If it seemed at first like simply a change in scale (our mail would be faster, cheaper, more easily distributed to large groups), we now realize that email entails a more fundamental alteration in our communicative consciousness.
Randy Malamud's Email is written for anyone who feels their attention and their intelligence--not to mention their eyesight--being sucked away, byte by byte, in a deadening tsunami of ill-composed blather and meaningless internet flotsam.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781501341915 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 09/19/2019 |
| Series: | Object Lessons |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | NOOK Book |
| Pages: | 184 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Randy Malamud is Regents' Professor of English at Georgia State University, USA. He is the author of ten books, including Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity (1998), Poetic Animals and Animal Souls (2003), and The Importance of Elsewhere: The Globalist Humanist Tourist (2018). He writes about film, travel, ecocriticism, and culture for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Times Higher Education, Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, Film International, Common Knowledge, Salon, Huffington Post, The Conversation, and truthout. He is a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
OPEN
The individual email is a unitary, bounded collection of codes and data, one item in a much larger system also, in the aggregate, called email, produced by a technology commonly known as email, which uses the medium of email to email an email. (I cannot resist: "The medium is the message.") Email is many things, many related but distinct operations and significations. But is it an actual object? Rarely, one might print out an email on paper, which may seem to embody email-as-object. But email is not meant for reading on paper. "Please consider the environment before printing," email signatures commonly hector. "Don't waste resources." "More than half of all pages printed are never used." To print is to misconstrue, even to desecrate, its ephemerally luminous quality.
I am not suggesting that email is completely, innately objectless: indeed, that would invalidate the discourse, the trope — the object! — you now hold in your hand. A book titled Email in a series called Object Lessons would seem to demonstrate unequivocally that email is an object.
But email is a paradoxical object consisting in some part, even in considerable part, of objectlessness: of that which it is not. An iteration of something (now obsolete) that once resembled it, it is mail, but it is also not mail. It is elusive, insubstantial. There are so many emails that they may be invisible. They are so necessary that they are worthless; the idea of email is so brilliant that it is inane.
Email may point to a concrete object, or emanate from such an object, as you find when you search your account for a keyword that will yield your hotel address, the technician's time of arrival, or instructions on how to return a bum purchase. The Radisson, your oven, and an unappealing towel (that looked more sumptuously absorptive online than it turned out to be irl) are objects that have been ensconced in email, facilitated by email, so there is a second-degree objectness here, consequent upon its service as conveyor or conduit of objects. Email may be an object by association, by implication, by extrapolation. "Viaduct" might be a better category than "object" to classify email: certainly a viaduct can also be an object, but such an object is more fundamentally about moving, processing, transmitting, and sorting other (more material) objects that pass through it. "Email is really nothing more than a medium," Merlin Mann says. "It gets things from one place to another."
Jobs and relationships begin and end on email. Births and deaths make inboxes chime with the same tone as a missive about a late Nigerian prince whose estate inexplicably wants to send me $6.2 million. The things that flow through this conduit are polyvalent and polymorphous. We might characterize the object as news, or stuff, or desire, or disappointment: an object fabricated with abstraction, metaphysicality, that challenges us to describe, to quantify, to hold and feel, and collect and appraise it qua object.
FYI: It is probably not the case that contemporary society is doomed to falter in an anarchic miasma merely because the triumph of email has left us in a post-epistolary funk. Still, I cannot resist putting forth that possibility as the end point of a continuum on which we appraise the quidditas, the essence, of this relatively recent and unbelievably ubiquitous phenomenon. "A letter, by its inherent nature, indicates thought," writes Stanley Solomon. "E-mail is inherently anti-contemplative."
Not just letters have been superannuated, but even conversation itself: speech was "the mode in which most relationships have traditionally been conducted," but email "is increasingly normalized as a mode of social interaction" in commercial, professional, educational, and personal communication. Hamlet's dying words, "The rest is silence," would make a great email signature sign-off.
We spend our days writing, reading, sending and resending an enormous corpus of tediously insipid texts. People who once wrote perhaps a couple of letters a day might now send a dozen emails in an hour. "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives," Annie Dillard observes. "What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing."
Mahatma Gandhi warns: "No man can be turned into a permanent machine."
I will presume agreement on the premise that in the age of email, compared to any preceding era, the quantity of written correspondence is up and quality is down. As we slog through the collective consciousness of our grotesquely overstuffed inboxes, we can fine-tune this initial analysis to determine what email means, what is missing, what is new, and ultimately, at the end of the day, how we might do better. How could we try to attain a higher caliber of performance with this medium — smarter content; more thoughtful interaction; less mechanical and more humanistic in sensibility, affect, voice; less confusing, sloppy, and random (which is to say, more effectively communicative) in terms of tone, style, lingo; better liked and valued by its practitioners?
What, in a nutshell, are the rules of email? What is its mission statement? Apparently nobody really knows ... not even me. Email is quick and convenient, its admirers proclaim: it "can get anyone's attention at the fucking speed of light," says CEO Stewart Butterfield. Is that enough? McDonald's is quick and convenient, as are cigarettes, Uber, and Internet porn. Not exercising is quick and convenient, as are not reading and not voting. The point being: just because something is quick and convenient does not mean that it improves our lives or adds to the splendor of our civilization. Fast is great, sometimes, but the speed of modern existence has sparked a resistance, a rebuttal, in the form of the slow food movement, slow TV, slow fashion, slow living, and so on. And slow on.
Individual email habits are idiosyncratic — ways of organizing the to's and from's, styles of responding, formal informalities, varieties of signatures, methods of archiving, ways of ensuring that responses and action items have been processed. (Nearly every email I have received from my friend S. — who has published six books with Cambridge University Press — has been composed between 6:45 a.m. and 7:00 a.m. These are not unrelated data points.)
Most people seem to have a philosophy of email, though usually, they tell me, it is not one that they had bothered to articulate until I asked them. They have principles about how email should convey a certain standard of professionalism and proper social etiquette: what styles and voices best suit email exchanges with family, friends, students, bosses, business contacts. Most people feel confident that their own email demeanor is sensible and appropriate, while everyone else is too sloppy or too stiffly formal, too longwinded or too elliptical, too fast or too slow.
We can begin to anatomize the vacuity of email by noting the dearth of expressive terminology to describe its process and product. Think of the resplendent prEmail epistolary vocabulary for texts and technologies: missives, love letters, poison pen letters, fan letters, chain letters, Dear John letters, letters of introduction, letters of apology, condolence cards, get well soon. There are men of letters (who may have started out as letter boys), Colleges of Letters, and Republics of Letters. There are letter-openers and envelope-sealers, letter trays, letter scales, letterheads, letter carriers, letterweights, letter racks. W. H. Auden delivers a splendid array of letters in "Night Mail":
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers' declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue.
An autodidact was called "letter-learned": someone who advanced herself by reading letters, writing letters, and just generally living in, and soaking up, the richly stimulating milieu that was the world of letters. Deleuze and Guattari might say she was becoming lettered. "Letters" was a synecdoche for the study and mastery of written texts (philosophical, literary, and scholarly, among others). "By letters and by science is the man made semblable or lyke to god" wrote William Caxton in 1483.
Try to imagine describing a comparable character today, self-taught and self-improved, as "email-learned." LOL! WTF?
Envision a cabinet of wonders filled with all the fascinating ephemera that has been superseded by email. Email needs no racks or scales, no weights or openers, and that freedom from cognate tools and objects works to its detriment: people liked twiddling with gizmos and contraptions. OMG, think of postboxes of different lands: English red pillar boxes, U.S. "snorkel" collection boxes for drive-through deposits, funky modern Dutch orange boxes, Deutsche Post Briefkasten featuring a stylized post horn, the brass instrument that signaled the mail coach's arrival. Mailboxes are vanishing, redundant, poof, in the age of email. (You could think of your computer terminal as a pomo mailbox, but really, nobody does.) A few rusting holdouts still stand sadly in public places: convenient places to hide bombs during parades, they'll be collector's items in a decade.
Lacking all these accoutrements, what vocabulary do we have today to describe and accessorize our email communication? There's "phishing," which is not too bad — it's a "sensational spelling" (deliberately incorrect for effect: for example, Krispy Kreme, Mortal Kombat) with an etymological nod to "phreaks," telephone-era hackers, and also referencing a fishlike HTML tag used in chat transcripts about how to commit web fraud.
"Spam" is clever, from Monty Python's famously ironic paean:
Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam!
Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam!
Lovely spam! wonderful spam!
"Tubes" is good too, also ironic in its mockery of the late Alaska senator and amateur Internet theorist Ted Stevens, who explained,
The Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material.
(In the same Senate hearing where he explained how the tubes work, Stevens also referred to an email message as "an Internet," bless his heart.)
But spam, phishing, and tubes are outliers. Mostly, the language of email involves off-putting technical terms and imponderable acronyms, way too many acronyms: HTML, IMAP, MIME, LAN, TCP/IP, DNS, FTP, nodes, servers, clients, headers, domains, timestamps, data, data, data, .com, .gov, .edu. When email's rampant popularity meant that it needed to get faster and providers broadened the bandwidth data transmission, what did they call this next-generation upgrade? Broadband. (-, - ) ... zzzZZZ. They should've consulted the French engineers who named their new fast trains TGV, très grande vitesse! You can't say "tay jhay vay" without feeling a rush of speed; you can't say "broadband" without feeling like an IT geek.
It's all strikingly graceless and user-unfriendly, hindering our embrace of the technology we use so heavily. We feel at sea, most of us, because we can't understand and don't like the argot. When we talk about what we're doing on email, we don't feel snazzy; we sound clunky. In the world of XML, ASCII and routers, we don't really know what route we're on, which makes us feel like anxious, tentative bystanders. Stepping onto the TGV, I feel like I'm going very fast before the train even leaves the station; talking about email, I sound like a confused poseur, out of my depths. (A great grab-quote for a viciously negative review of this book: "a confused poseur, out of his depths.") Even the Oxford English Dictionary, a dependably gushing stream of etymological fascination, has little luster in its definition of email: "A system for sending textual messages (with or without attached files) to one or more recipients via a computer network (esp. the Internet); a message or messages sent using this system."
"Email" is unexciting in other tongues too. It is one of those terms that most languages don't even bother trying to translate. The fanatically francophone Académie Française tried to mandate courriel (from courrier electronique, electronic mail) — but it didn't take. In Yiddish — yes, Yiddish has taken the trouble to coin a word — blitzpostis not too bad ("blitz" = "lightning").
A Google image search for "email" generates a visual portfolio as bland as the linguistic one (see Fig. 4).
I suggest that this descriptive and semiotic dullness indicates a larger impoverishment. My hope is to enliven the medium, the artifact, the act of email — which I plan to do by poking it with a stick until it turns up something interesting. Back in 1844 when Morse was getting this all under way, skeptics of the new electric technology derided it as quackery resembling mesmerism, hypnotism, or some other brand of "Black Magic." Some thought his technology would be able to cross boundaries between not merely Maryland and the District of Columbia but also between life and death: people "believed such missives could be transmitted not just across great distances, but to and from the great beyond." Spiritualism was the thing of the moment, and the incredible new phenomenon of electricity buttressed the claims of those who believed that invisible forces might facilitate communication to invisible realms, such as the afterlife. (Even today, an app called Phoenix — get it? — allows users to get the last word by sending email posthumously.)
We remain enthralled by the electric e: Where can we not go, what can we not see, under the enchanted ether of e?
E for everybody. Email: mail plus e. And/or, mail by e. A subset of mail, a genre of mail, denoted by e; inflected by e. The e stands for electronic, though this etymological resonance is increasingly attenuated, like the x in X-ray (so called because its essential nature was unknown at the time) or the g in G-string (origin indeterminate). After all, everything is now electronic — e might as well stand for everything as much as it stands for electronic. E equals energy. Einstein, himself an E, must have thought he had pretty much cornered the market on e back in 1905 with his theory of special relativity; mass — energy equivalence: E = mc2.
But no one could have predicted what the modern age had in store for the letter e.
Silent e? Not any more: e has a lot to say! It is, beyond dispute, the letter of our times. E always had it good. It is the most commonly used letter in English: 12.7 percent of all letters are e. It comes from the Semitic letter hê (their fifth letter, as it is ours), which may have started as a praying or calling human figure (hillul: rejoice, jubilation), probably based on an Egyptian hieroglyph.
A similar Siniatic symbol, the right-hand figure in the Wadi el-Hol inscription, shows a man praying. Tip him sideways, lose his head and other extraneous body parts, and voila, he becomes the letter E.
I sometimes reprise, myself, this ancient expressivist letter-pose. I enact this ancestor of e, this prototype of e, this dance of e, in moments of both success and failure, connection and misconnection: expostulating with the brio of my own Semitic jubilation when I have found a strong wifi network; or, less salubriously, waving my device around in the (delusionsal?) belief that if my signal is spotty, I may still manage to "catch" a small piece of Internet as I flail, and may thereby connect to e(mail).
E is in the throes of a millennia-long journey, a symbolic journey, a linguistic journey, a journey of ideas and of spirituality, of evolution, enunciation, emotion, elaboration. The pièce de résistance of this ubiquitous letter, the ne plus ultra, lies in the ubiquity of email. If we think of a letter in search of an object, email embodies e's exultance in this enterprise. There are other objects, too, affixed to e: e-cigarettes, e-books, e-content, e-waste. In Scientology, an E-meter measures electrical changes in the body to determine a person's mental state. In a rave, e is ecstasy, a psychoactive drug that dissolves fear and relieves tension. But it is email that has become the pitch pipe we use to determine the key of E, where "on forever's very now we stand" (in the words of, obviously, E. E. Cummings).
Speaking of overdetermined email signifiers, where did @ come from? Who would've guessed that it would be the dingbat of the future? If you had registered a [c] for @ thirty years ago, you would be a wealthy person today. Generally (awkwardly) called "the at sign," there is no specific English word for it. The French call it arobase, and other languages have colorful nicknames: in Israel it's a "strudel," in Croatia a "monkey," in Danish an "elephant's trunk," and in Mandarin Chinese it's a "little mouse."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Email"
by .
Copyright © 2020 Randy Malamud.
Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Pre-mailCompose
Subject
Attachment
Inbox
Send
Reply-All
Delete
Junk
Out of Office: After Email
Postscript: How to Write and Read an Email
Index
Customer Reviews
