Email speeds messages but multiplies their volume without shrinking total time spent
Evidence
Anyone to whom these reflections are too abstract can easily help themselves make it more concrete with a contemporary example: without a doubt, the establishment of e-mail essentially accelerated communication. Writing and sending an e-mail message may take only half as much time as a conventional letter. However, when the quantity of e-mails written daily exceeds the number of letters one wrote daily by a factor of four, the amount of time dedicated to correspondence climbs by 100 percent! That this corresponding growth relates to the speed of communication transmission, moreover, is incontestable. If the answer to the morning message has already been received by nightfall while previously one required at least fourteen days, then it seems that an inherent impulse toward the accelerated continuation of chains of communication and action results. Nevertheless, this impulse can be neither logically nor causally reduced to technical acceleration: the heightening of the quantity of communication is made possible by technology, but not compelled by it. The perceptible compulsion to heighten therefore results not from technics itself, but rather from the contraction of the present enabled by it, i.e., from the accelerated transformation of the context of communication and action. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 1084
Categorization
- CANDY: The email math — twice as fast but four times as many, net 100% more time — is a delightfully concrete, tweetable paradox.
- SEED: Angle for an essay: the ‘email paradox’ generalized to explain why every productivity tool makes us busier.
- XREF: connects to: Faster action can decelerate life only if freed time becomes rest. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 353; Time-saving technologies become the means of extracting more labor time — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 451; Time-saving technology coexists with unprecedented felt time scarcity (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- A communication medium both increases and decreases the same connection simultaneously.
#corroborates(0.85) — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 549