Email Overload

From the Los Angeles Times:

 Nor is e-mail always friendly — it can be confrontational in a way that talking usually isn’t.

"If we’re having feelings with someone else that we need to confront," says therapist Firstenberg, "many times we’ll resort to an e-mail rather than take the risk of picking up the phone and calling. . . . It’s a very egocentric act. . . . It’s dumping. And it gets really misunderstood."

Even if the e-mail is friendly, there’s still risk of offense if the recipient doesn’t respond quickly. Already feeling pressured to keep up with her in-box, attorney Jamison feels added stress from this kind of friendly fire.

"Less than half a day goes by and you’ll get an e-mail saying, ‘Why haven’t you responded to my e-mail?’ " she says. "The expectation, because you’ve sent it, is the other person is looking at his screen all the time and his job is to look at his screen waiting for e-mails."

According to Jackson, information overload is not just making life at the dinner table less pleasant as Mom checks her BlackBerry, but it’s also undermining civilization itself.

"We’re so overloaded by information bites that we’re less and less able to go deeply, to create knowledge or wisdom out of all the information," she says. "This is one reason why I say we’re on the cusp of a dark age."

Historically, dark ages have sometimes been periods of technical advancement, she explains, "but they’re ultimately times of cultural decline. I think we’re defining our own dark age by skimming along on the surface of life and relationships and thoughts. And it’s certainly a dark age when we’re faced with an ignorance born not out of a lack of information but out of an inability to create knowledge out of the information around us."