The Skimmer

The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox

By John Freeman

Scribner; 256 pages

Six months before John Freeman began his treatise for a "Slow Communication Movement," the literary critic was receiving about 300 e-mails a day. And he was not alone. In the time it takes to read this sentence, some 300 million e-mails will be sent and received. On average, Americans spend more time reading e-mails than they do with their spouses. E-mail has become, he argues, "our electronic fidget." In his history of mail from cuneiform tablets to the Pony Express to Gmail, Freeman traces how far the epistolary form has come--and lays out a case for why we should take a step back. E-mail might be cheaper, faster and more convenient, but its virtues also make us lazier, lonelier and less articulate. The author's solution: Go easy on that inbox. Don't read e-mails over breakfast or in bed. And think twice before hitting that send button. "This is not the manifesto of a Luddite," Freeman insists, but of a humanitarian. Because, as he observes, "the difference between a smiley face and an actual smile is too large to calculate."

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