The Great Seduction

The Tyranny of E-Mail

The Tyranny of E-Mail

By JOHN FREEMAN

Reviewed by Andrew Keen

In May 1844, Samuel F. B. Morse sent America’s first electronic message. This “telegram,” which Morse sent from Baltimore, arrived at the speed of electricity in Washington D.C. with the biblical message: “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT?”

Morse’s 19th-century telegraph became the 20th-century telephone which then became the 21st century e-mail, the dominant communications medium of our electronically networked world. And it’s against e-mail that John Freeman’s spirited and smart polemic, The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox, is addressed.

“What have we wrought?” Freeman asks, when our “dream of obliterating distance” begins to “become a reality?” What we have wrought, he answers in this counter to the orthodoxy of techno-optimism, is a world in which the distinction between leisure and work has been obliterated and e-mail has become an always-on electronic tyranny......

FOR MORE, GO TO BARNES & NOBLE REVIEW

Right gesture, wrong book

To celebrate the launch of the Nook, its new e-book reader, Barnes & Noble is giving away a free copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point to the first 10,000 people who buy the $259 device when it is released late next month.

Right gesture, wrong book.

The truth is that we are now way beyond the tipping point of the electronic book story. And it’s not just the Nook that has tipped the scales from the analog to the digital....

FOR MORE, GO TO INTERNETEVOLUTION

New camera will reveal your entire life

It’s appropriate, perhaps, that the land of green fields and red pillar-boxes which produced the 20th century version of Big Brother, has also just introduced a 21st century twist on Orwell’s ubiquitous electronic spy. “A new camera promises to capture your life” screams the ominous headline in the New Scientist....

GO TO TELEGRAPH FOR MORE

Is social media bad for our kids?

It’s the F word question that all parents now dread. “Can I go on Facebook?” your eleven year-old bullies you over dinner, declaring that absolutely everybody else in her class is not only on Facebook, but also on Twitter as well as Bebo and Orkut and other peculiarly named social networks.

So how should parents in today’s social media age deal with the F word question? Is social networking bad for children’s brains? Should we allow our kids to freely expose their identities on the Internet....

READ MORE AT DAILY TELEGRAPH

Adieu reality

So the U.S. Secret Service continues to investigate the teenage author of the Obama assassination poll on Facebook.

Are you in favor of this investigation?

a. Yes
b. No
c. Maybe
d. Yes, if it cuts my healthcare

Seriously, however, I wonder if the Secret Service needs to look more broadly at this bizarre poll about whether Facebook users think it appropriate to assassinate the democratically elected president of the United States of America.

Perhaps the real investigation should be of the 731 people who actually responded to the poll before it got pulled down by the Facebook authorities.

Maybe the Secret Service should investigate the Internet and its impact on our mental distinction between fantasy and reality.

What needs to be investigated is what exactly were those 731 Facebook users thinking when they saw that poll with the question, “Should Obama be killed?” What, exactly, were they thinking when they physically responded by actually clicking one of the buttons to that mindless poll?

Maybe the real investigation should be into what damage the Internet is doing to the thinking....

READ MORE ON INTERNET EVOLUTION

The blob

What is the core problem of today’s newspaper industry? What is the central challenge of the Internet to the old certainties of the news business?

According to Clay Shirky, the New York University professor of new media and the author of the 2008 international hit book Here Comes Everybody, the central problem is that there isn’t a central problem. It’s the disappearance of the centre, Shirky argued when he and I spoke at Ryerson University in Toronto last weekend, which is most undermining the old industrial newspaper industry with its top down hierarchies and tangible centres of power.

Perhaps Shirky will entitle his next book Everything Changes..... MORE

An entirely unfair analysis of why American newspapers suck

Last Friday, I had the pleasure of spending an evening at Ryerson University in Toronto with new media theorist Clay Shirky debating the future of news. After our public discussion, somebody in the audience asked why American newspapers are in so much worse a state that those in Europe or Latin America.

The explanation is cultural. In contrast with the rest of the world, there is an illusion in the United States – both amongst newspaper readers and publishers – about the seductive ideal of objective news. In America, serious newspapers are held up to be public paragons of objectivity existing above the fray of human affairs, unbiasedly funneling paragraphs of absolute truth to their readers. This accounts, of course, for the pinching seriousness of papers like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. And it also explains why these newspapers are constantly targeted by the braying mob for their supposed liberal and conservative bias.

This also explains the appalling seriousness of the American newspaper editor..... MORE