I get a lot of email, I mean a lot — not as much as I did when I was in commerce, but still what could justifiably be called a deluge. Some of it is of my own making, most of it is not. Almost all of it demands a thoughtful reply, and each reply takes, for me at least, emotional energy if the response is going to be more than the web 2.0 version of a grunt.
In addition to the volume of mail I get, emailers have increasingly imposed their own ever shortening version of response times to that torrent. Besides whatever they wrote, they implicitly say: I wrote you. I want, demand, will extort, a reply NOW.
Most of this is influenced by people’s business lives in which instant response is the primary reason we equip the armies of commerce with electronic communications in the first place. The ubiquity of chat session, twitter, facebook, instagram and the like, and what the IBM Research Labs used to call Presence, is the other reason modern society demands instantaneous authentication of our electronic bleatings.
I tried to resist, casually returning thoughtful replies to thoughtful emails at what I felt was an appropriate pace. But then I would get back notes that verged on the vitriolic, as if the delay in my reply obviated what I actually had to say. Some of this was from people who were once intimates and who should understand, so, with that, I now say, enough.
Rather than demanding that the world react on my emotional metronome — the metronome of the dark ages of, say, seven years ago — I’m just going to declare as many others have that I am a bad correspondent. That’s that. Send me what you will. I will probably reply, but I’ll do it between my writing, when I can, as correspondents have done for the past few thousand years. Since I am not in control of a nuclear missile silo, an intensive care unit, or anything else requiring second-by-second Jack-Bower-style readiness, I feel that this is an acceptable separate peace made with the outside world, one well short of outright email bankruptcy.
Over and out.
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