A world Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

The Twenty-First-Century
Moonshot
In 1998, the social critic Neil Postman gave an important speech
titled “Five Things We Need to Know about Technological Change.”
1
He opened by saying that although he didn’t have solutions to all the
problems surrounding modern technology, he could share some
ideas based on his over thirty years of studying the topic. Each of his
ideas is profound. He talked, for example, about the fundamental
trade-off inherent in all technological change: “For every advantage a
new technology offers, there is always a corresponding
disadvantage.” He also argued that these advantages and
disadvantages are never “distributed evenly” among the population.
It’s the fourth of his five ideas, however, that I want to dwell on,
as it casts into sharp relief the intellectual framework I’ve attempted
to build in this book:
Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. . . . A
new medium does not add something; it changes everything.
In the year 1500, after the printing press was invented, you
did not have old Europe plus the printing press. You had a
different Europe.
Postman’s idea clarifies the confusing cognitive dissonance so
many people feel about digital communication tools like email.
Rationally, we know email is a better way to deliver messages than
the technologies it superseded: it’s universal, it’s fast, it’s essentially
free. For anyone old enough to remember clearing jammed fax

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machines or struggling to open the red-thread ties of those worn
memo folders, there’s no debate that email elegantly solves real
problems that once made office life really annoying. At the same
time, however, we’re fed up with our inboxes, which seem to be as
much a source of stress and overwork as they are a productivity
boon. These dual reactions—admiration and detestation—are
confusing and leave many knowledge workers in a state of frustrated
resignation.
Drawing from Postman, we can gain clarity. The issue is that we
tend to think of email as additive; that the office of 2021 is like the
office of 1991 plus faster messaging. But this is wrong. Email isn’t
additive; it’s ecological. The office of 2021 is not the office of 1991
plus some extra capabilities; it’s instead a different office altogether
—one in which work unfolds as a never-ending, ad hoc, unstructured
flow of messages, a workflow I named the hyperactive hive mind. We
didn’t used to work this way, but today, now thoroughly entangled in
the hive mind’s demands, we find ourselves crushed by shallow
busyness and struggling to get important work done, all the while
feeling increasingly miserable.