David Sarnoff, Marconi telegrapher and future President of RCA, in 1908. The Sarnoff Collection, TCNJ.
Give those early innovators their due. It all started with a single wire carrying words coded in simple on-off pulses, hardly more than a long-distance doorbell.
When did we pass over the threshold into what has become the consequential change in the human condition known as the “Information Age?” Many would perhaps place this monumental transition around the 1920s, with the popularity of radio and the early attempts to make “smart machines.” But the real beginnings of our obsession with electronic media began much earlier, with a simpler but demonically influential breakthrough.
The telegraph began as a system of wires and keys that could send text-coded electric pulses over extended distances. Wires on poles spread rapidly throughout the eastern United States in the 1850s. And with this growing network, information began to move at the speed of light rather than the pace of a horse or locomotive. By the civil war era Boston could “talk” to New York or Washington D.C. in real time.
We had entered the age of harnessing electrons for communication, making distance insignificant. The process of shrinking the world had begun. Gradually news came as easily from 300 miles away as from down the street.
Sterling Colorado Railroad Station, 1880s
The change is easy to visualize with two iconic forms of communication usually built side by side. Old images of railroads stretching across mountains and prairies usually include telegraph poles marching along the line. The single wire literally ran through each station along the route, and through the dispatcher’s desk key before exiting the other side of the building. Telegraphy not only made train travel safer, but the thin metal wire also began to carry news from one location to the next at far greater speed. These included accounts of local happenings that were reported in the 19th Century equivalent of a “breaking” story.
We had entered the age of harnessing electrons to make distance immaterial; the process of shrinking the world had begun.
President Lincoln became addicted to telegraphy. Throughout the civil war he spent ours across the street from the White House at the War Office, waiting to hear from his generals in various battle locations which had been wired by the military.
News of Lincoln’s assassination in Ford’s Theater spread in the east within hours. But it would take up to ten days for word of the tragedy to reach portions of the country west of the Pony Express origination point in St. Joseph Missouri.
New telegraph lines passing through New England led transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau to note that “we are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” The same could be said about phone obsessives today. But that’s another story. The race was on to build news networks to be known as “wire services” that terminated in most city news rooms, providing local papers with much more coverage of events that had occurred in distant cities. To this day The Associated Press still depends on local reporters to feed local stories of potential national interest to their far-flung subscribers.
Fittingly, the most important thoroughfares in some cities carried the name of the new network that was beginning to knit the country together. Telegraph Road is arguably Detroit’s best-known Street, and somehow fitting in a city known for technology and innovation. San Francisco and Berkeley California have their own versions, and do many other towns.
So when you wonder when we became addicts to the effects of charged electrons traveling at the speed of light, give those early 19th Century innovators their due. It all started with a single wire carrying simple on-off pulses, technically little more than a long distance doorbell, but one that would eventually summon us all.
For most of us something like a “rule of 10” applies: for every 10 messages in our inbox there may be one with some relevance to our lives.
Nearly everyone is overwhelmed with too many emails. Those that work in large organizations are especially likely to face the same daily high tide that rushes in at a rate of one or two every few minutes. So this requires a daily routine that includes clearing out our inbox, which means getting rid of a lot ‘fishing’ emails from outside groups, not to mention missives from fellow workers who use the “send to all” button as an easy claim to institutional relevancy.
The simple problem is that the system feeds on itself. The more emails we answer the more we get. And for most of us something like a “rule of 10” applies: for every 10 messages there is one that may have some relevance to our lives. Sometimes the ratio seems more like 100 to 1. The bigger problem is that email is usually a distraction that keeps us from doing more useful things.
How can we deal with this sponge on our time? The strategies vary, none of them perfect. Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian recommends a solution tried by Tony Hsieh, the President of Zappos.
He calls it “Yesterbox,” because the premise is that you should stop focusing on email received today, except when urgent, and instead try to deal with everything that came in yesterday. It’s an idea so simple, your first response might legitimately be, “Huh? What difference could that make?” A big one, it turns out.
The logic is that a “closed list” of yesterday’s emails is easier to get through. Burkeman notes that “in your Yesterbox, you’re no longer on a treadmill: one email dealt with means one fewer to deal with; the target you’re aiming for isn’t receding constantly into the distance.” That may be true, but it’s small comfort and a minor psychological advantage gained over working from the most recent to the oldest.
Here are some additional suggestions that can result in spending less time each day on stuffed in-boxes, even within an organization that treats email as the “official” channel of communication.
Turn off the audio email notifications on your computer. They feed our curiosity and can break the rhythm of more significant work.
Check email only once or twice a day. Give it the lower priority it usually deserves.
Save email for the low part of your daily productivity curve. If you are the most creative and energetic in the morning, don’t waste your time on it then. The tedium of going through it can probably wait until that after-lunch miasma kicks in.
Don’t substitute texting for email. The norm of instant response for texts can be a major time-killer, intensifying the problem you are trying to solve.
Spend more time in “airplane mode,” even when you are on the ground. Our addiction to screens is real and growing. In order to tame it, set aside sizable segments of the day when you are more available in real space more than virtual space. Anyway, you look smarter when not seen by friends and coworkers frozen into a “screen thrall,” which looks only slightly better than drooling in public.
Like most most forms of communication, emails from co-workers usually have an expressive purpose that outweighs the need to respond. For these a simple acknowledgment is enough.
Some groups are serial offenders in over-sending messages. Attempts to unsubscribe or block them will probably not work. Learn to be fast with the delete key for these groups. And if you do reach a live body at the organization, express your displeasure with their abuse of your inbox.
Now, if I can just get with the program myself. . .
Additional Suggestions? Comment at Woodward@tcnj.edu
President Lincoln became addicted to telegraphy. Throughout the civil war he spent ours across the street from the White House at the War Office, waiting to hear from his generals in various battle locations which had been wired by the military.
