Digital Universe. Peter B. Seel

3 Critical Perspectives

       “When you’ve got 5 minutes to fill, Twitter is a great way to fill 35 minutes.”

      Matt Cutts, former head of Webspam team at Google

       “The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful.”

      Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law Professor

      Tweets, Texts, Alerts, and the Age of Interruption

      The effects of Moore’s law in creating ever more powerful information processing and communication devices and software over the past half century have led to a dramatic expansion of the use of these tools in daily life. Few of us living and working in the digital universe could contemplate daily life without our mobile phones, laptops, and tax preparation software. Mobile phones have become ubiquitous worldwide and are now so commonplace that we pay little attention to their users – unless they bump into us while composing a text message. We no longer assume that a lone person walking along staring into space and having a loud conversation with an unseen person is emotionally disturbed. We know this person is merely using a phone with a wireless headset. What is remarkable is the relatively rapid diffusion of mobile devices used in public places since 2001, and technology savants predict that this explosion in the number of mobile communication technologies will only increase in this century.

While these mobile telecommunication devices are highly visible, I would argue that other digital communication technologies have had an equal or greater effect on networked societies. Few have evolved as quickly or been as widely adopted in information-oriented societies as email and its relations, texting and tweeting.¹ While text messaging used to be the teenage communication medium of choice, adults of all ages are now texting instead of calling or emailing. Email is seen by many users (and that includes myself) as both a remarkable communication tool and a daily curse. On the plus side, a single important email message can be sent with a single click to a list of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people at once. On the negative side, a single spam advertising message can be sent with a single click to lists of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people at once. Tele-connected people swim daily in an ever-rising sea of relevant messages and irrelevant spam. Estimates for the global volume of spam emails range from 45 to 73 percent of total email volume sent each day – and research firms estimate that spam messages cost global businesses $158 billion each year due to lost productivity and the need to filter email traffic.² Even a conservative estimate would indicate that the effect of spam messages on the business and organizational use of email has turned into a massive cat-and-mouse game of attempting to outwit global spammers.

      Perhaps only a telephone conversation can equal email or a text message in terms of communication speed and efficiency. Email is the clear technology of choice when a written record of communication must be generated, when there are multiple recipients to a message, or if a digital document needs to be attached to the message. I routinely spend an hour every day, seven days a week, writing email messages and replying to them. This includes a significant amount of time deleting spam messages inviting me to make millions of dollars in Nigerian financial dealings, refinance my home, view photos of how certain celebrities have aged, or contribute to innumerable social causes. All of the unfiltered spam needs to be screened, lest an important message be overlooked. I have stopped looking at the extensive list of filtered messages and I can only hope that some valid messages are not tossed out with the spam.

      The widespread adoption of email is part of its accursed blessing. In large organizations such as the university where I taught and conducted research, email is the primary means of asynchronous communication. It also means that any unread personal email will pile up in the university’s email servers (multiple powerful computers with significant storage capacity) until it is either read or deleted. One of the major disincentives to taking a long vacation or trip was the mountain of unanswered email that accumulated in one’s absence. Dealing with this backlog required that one return from a vacation a day early to sort through the important messages. Another option was to take along a laptop so that email could be read and easily answered while taking time to get away from the office. The faint buzzing sound we hear coming from Boston is back-to-nature philosopher Henry David Thoreau spinning in his grave.

The tradeoff for the speed, convenience, and efficiency of email is the time required each day to read and reply to a long list of messages. In a 2019 survey of 1,002 US adults by software firm Adobe, researchers found that connected individuals spent five hours a day checking emails (three hours at work and another two hours at home for personal and work messages).³ Extrapolate this figure to the millions of networked professionals around the world and this global time commitment to computer-mediated communication borders on the astonishing. Another significant downside to email is deciding what to do with all of it. The greater the email volume, the more time-consuming these decisions become. Since I have a packrat tendency to keep almost all non-spam emails in the event that I might need to retrieve an essential message in the future, I often need to sort related messages into dedicated storage folders.⁴ I doubt that I could do my writing and research efficiently without email, as it is so central to fast and efficient communication between university colleagues and global experts on telecommunication technologies with whom I consult.

      For university students it provides a usually reliable method of reaching faculty with questions about course assignments, deadlines, and grades. One interesting twist to the speed and efficiency of email is that, because it can be used in a synchronous way much like a