Published Book by Thomas Benz

March 28, 2019

On the Impending Death of Email

For an introvert of my stripe, the emergence of email was a revelation, an answer to a prayer I had not yet managed to form. Writing had long been a natural medium for me but when it came to communicating with people remotely, the era of letter writing had long passed, except for the hastily scribbled note in a Christmas card to friends who had scattered across the country. I had never been in love with the telephone and the advent of the untethered models, which made contact possible in virtually every circumstance, did not much change my opinion at all. Such conversations required a spontaneous verbal facility I was never likely to possess, and presented numerous impediments to rapport, robbed as they were of the information accorded by any face-to-face encounter.
As with their stationary counterparts, mobile devices continued to strip you of visual context; the code of expressions, gestures, and other nonverbal cues from which to interpret what was really being conveyed. Still absent was the mutual environment which could become a source of bonding in itself, or offer some momentary relief from a conflicting exchange. As before, the quality of the sound might be impaired by volume, static, background noise in a way that could not easily be remedied. One could simply not lean a fraction closer to someone who was not there. The cell phone only added a myriad of obstacles to undistracted dialogue, which anyone who has ever heard their ringtone at a rock concert or near an airport runway can attest.
But my God, email was the perfect creation for those who wanted to have a real colloquy, thoughtful back and forth which didn’t depend on a rapier wit, the gift of the raconteur, or a surfeit of charm. It wouldn’t run afoul of an interruption or a clumsy change of subject. Not only could it be fashioned in one’s own time, but could be clawed back like a court statement stricken from the record through the benevolence of a quick edit. Because I preferred to navigate my connections through a laptop instead of a phone, dispensing a paragraph instead of a phrase didn’t represent any particular dexterity or feat of concentration amid a surrounding flow of traffic. That the recipient was not bothered, obligated to read my less than earth shattering material until he felt like it, and vice versa, seemed part of the medium’s leisurely appeal. Though I probably used it to excess, substituting an electronic message for a more personal contact, email was that rare innovation that actually improved my life, rather than merely complicating it.
I can’t precisely pinpoint when more and more, the content of emails began to dwindle, to be compressed into the bare bones of essential information, when occasionally they would go unanswered altogether, maybe three or four years ago. It may have been more. It wasn’t that I felt the license to turn every routine chat into a diatribe but I found the opposite extreme vexing. The twitterization of the world, with its forced compression, its odd acronyms and emphasis on speed was no doubt one of the culprits in the beginning but the coup-de-gras was certainly the assault of the text message. When suddenly nearly everyone could communicate in real time via the written word, on devices whose keyboard letters were less than half the width of a finger, that’s when the long form of communication seems to have been rendered obsolete, as archaic as a castle moat, a telegraph, the horse and buggy.
So now I must be mindful that my epistles, the tangents and verbal flourishes which may have been welcomed in a bygone age, will likely be met with consternation. However felicitously stated, their responses tend to be clipped, stunted, maddeningly to the point, as if I can hear the sender, as she juggles two or three other situations, muttering “who has time for this anymore?” As email ultimately fades into oblivion, to elude the risk of becoming a hermit, I’ll have to make the adjustment, little different from the replacement paper with screens, dollar bills with a digital censor. Yet the constraints on language via texting seem too much to bear. I may just have to wrangle people into the same room for a coffee a little more often, or at least reacquaint myself with what their voices sound like, by giving them a call.