[tt] [IP] E-Mail Reply to All: 'Leave Me Alone'

Sun May 27 16:46:52 UTC 2007

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From: David Farber <dave at farber.net>
Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 18:46:00 -0400
To: ip at v2.listbox.com
Subject: [IP] E-Mail Reply to All: 'Leave Me Alone'
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/24/ 
AR2007052402258_pf.html

E-Mail Reply to All: 'Leave Me Alone'

By Mike Musgrove
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 25, 2007; A01

Last month, venture capitalist Fred Wilson drew a lot of attention on  
the Internet when he declared a 21st century kind of bankruptcy. In a  
posting on his blog about technology, Wilson announced he was giving  
up on responding to all the e-mail piled up in his inbox.

"I am so far behind on e-mail that I am declaring bankruptcy," he  
wrote. "If you've sent me an e-mail (and you aren't my wife, partner,  
or colleague), you might want to send it again. I am starting over."

College professors have done the same thing, and a Silicon Valley  
chief executive followed Wilson's example the next day. Last  
September, the recording artist Moby sent an e-mail to all the  
contacts in his inbox announcing that he was taking a break from e- 
mail for the rest of the year.

The supposed convenience of electronic mail, like so many other  
innovations of technology, has become too much for some people.  
Swamped by an unmanageable number of messages -- the volume of e-mail  
traffic has nearly doubled in the past two years, according to  
research firm DYS Analytics -- and plagued by annoying spam and  
viruses, some users are saying "Enough!"

Those declaring bankruptcy are swearing off e-mail entirely or, more  
commonly, deleting all old messages and starting fresh.

E-mail overload gives many workers the sense that their work is never  
done, said senior analyst David Ferris, whose firm, Ferris Research,  
said there were 6 trillion business e-mails sent in 2006. "A lot of  
people like the feeling that they have everything done at the end of  
the day," he said. "They can't have it anymore."

So some say they're moving back to the telephone as their preferred  
means of communication.

"From here on out I am going back to voice communication as my  
primary mechanism for interacting with people," wrote Jeff Nolan,  
chief executive of the business software company Teqlo, in his blog  
announcing his e-mail boycott.

The term "e-mail bankruptcy" may have been coined as early as 1999 by  
a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who studies the  
relationship between people and technology.

Professor Sherry Turkle said she came up with the concept after  
researching e-mail and discovering that some people harbor fantasies  
about escaping their e-mail burden.

Turkle, who estimated that she has 2,500 pieces of unread e-mail in  
her inbox, is one of those people. A book she has been working on for  
a decade is coming out soon. Turkle joked that it would have taken  
her half the time to write it "if I didn't have e-mail."

Some people who don't want to go through the drastic-seeming measure  
of declaring total bankruptcy say they are trying to gently  
discourage the use of e-mail in their communications in favor of more  
personal calls or instant messages.

"I am reachable, just e-mail is not a good way to do it," said Sean  
Bonner, chief executive of a news blog network who has automatic  
responses set up on his work and personal accounts warning he doesn't  
check e-mail as often as he used to.

Even those who've chosen partial e-mail engagement say they continue  
to struggle with the question of whether or not to reply.

Stanford University technology professor Lawrence Lessig publicly  
declared e-mail bankruptcy a few years ago after being deluged by  
thousands of e-mails. "I eventually got to be so far behind that I  
was either going to spend all my time answering e-mails or I was  
going to do my job," he said.

Thereafter, Lessig's correspondents received e-mail equivalents of  
Dear John letters: "Dear person who sent me a yet-unanswered e-mail,  
he wrote, "I apologize, but I am declaring e-mail bankruptcy," he  
said, adding an apology for his lack of "cyber decency."

He eliminated about 90 percent of his e-mail traffic, but said he  
can't quite abandon it entirely. "The easiest strategy is just to  
ignore e-mail, but I just can't psychologically do that," Lessig said  
in an interview.

If there is a downside to completely turning a back on e-mail, it's  
not one many former users notice.

Stanford computer science professor Donald E. Knuth started using e- 
mail in 1975 and stopped using it 15 years later. Knuth said he  
prefers to concentrate on writing books rather than be distracted by  
the steady stream of communication.

"I'd get to work and start answering e-mail -- three hours later, I'd  
say, "Oh, what was I supposed to do today?" Knuth said that he has no  
regrets. "I have been a happy man since Jan. 1 , 1990."

The critics of e-mail themselves have critics, who say copping out is  
a reactionary and isolationist way of dealing with modern  
communications.

Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor David J. Farber  
receives piles of e-mail as the administrator of the "Interesting  
People" technology news mailing list. He has no patience for e-mail  
bankruptcy.

"For a venture capitalist to say something like this -- he should get  
out of the technology field," Farber said.

Wilson, the venture capitalist, did not respond to a phone call  
placed to his firm -- or to an e-mailed request for comment.

Staff writer Sabrina Valle and staff researcher Richard Drezen  
contributed to this report.

--
Seth Grimes   Alta Plana Corp, analytical computing & data management
              Intelligent Enterprise magazine (CMP), Contributing  
Editor
grimes at altaplana.com       http://altaplana.com    301-270-0795

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