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

determinism.
The literature on this philosophy is filled with fascinating
examples. One of the better-known determinist books is Neil
Postman’s 1985 classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death. In this short
treatise, Postman argues that the format through which mass media
is delivered can impact the way a culture thinks about the world. (If
this reminds you of Marshall McLuhan’s famed claim that “the
medium is the message,” you won’t be surprised to learn that
Postman studied under McLuhan.)
Postman uses this concept to argue, among other points, that the
impact of the printing press is deeper than we realize. The standard
narrative about this invention is that mass-produced pamphlets and
books allowed information to spread faster and farther, speeding up
the evolution of knowledge that culminated in the Age of Reason.
Postman replies that the influence of the resulting “typographic”
culture did more than just speed up information flow; it changed the
way our brains processed our world. “Print put forward a definition
of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the
mind,” he writes, “and at the same time encouraged forms of public

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discourse with serious, logically ordered content.”
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It was this new
way of thinking—not just newly available information—that suddenly
made intellectual innovations such as Enlightenment philosophy and
the scientific method natural next steps. Gutenberg, in other words,
thought he was setting information free, but in reality, he was
changing fundamentally what information we treated as important.
A more modern example of technological determinism is the
introduction of the Like button to Facebook. As revealed by
contemporaneous blog posts written by the design team, the original
purpose of this feature was to clean up the comments below users’
posts. Facebook engineers noticed that many such comments were
simple positive exclamations, like “cool” or “nice.” They figured that
if those could instead be captured by clicking Like, the comments
that remained would be more substantive. The goal of this tweak, in
other words, was a modest improvement, but they soon noticed an
unexpected side effect: users began spending more time on the
service.
As became clear in retrospect, incoming Likes provide users with
an uneven stream of social approval indicators—bits of evidence
that other people are thinking about you. The idea that every tap of
the Facebook app might give you new information about these
indicators hijacked ancient social drives in the human brain and
made the platform suddenly significantly more appealing. Whereas
people used to log on to Facebook occasionally to see what their
friends were up to, they were now more likely to check in constantly
throughout the day to see how much approval their latest posts had
generated. Soon every other major platform introduced similar
approval indicator streams—favorites, retweets, auto-tagging photos,
streaks—as part of a technological contest played out on the field of
what became known as attention engineering, a battle that left in its
wake a small number of massively powerful technology platform
monopolies and a weary populace exhausted by a life increasingly
dominated by handheld glowing screens. All this because of a small
number of engineers who desired to make social media comments
less cluttered.
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A key property of technological determinism is that the innovation in
question alters our behavior in ways that were neither intended nor

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predicted by those first adopting the tool. This idea might make you
uncomfortable, as it seems to impart some notion of autonomy to
inanimate objects—as if the technology itself is deciding how it
should be used. You wouldn’t be alone in your unease: there are
many scholars today who steer well clear of determinist analysis,
which in recent years has fallen out of fashion in academic circles
currently more enamored with theories that understand tools as
vectors of social power. But the longer I study the intersection of
technology and office culture, the more I’m convinced that in this