Using Technology Instead of Technology Using Us

Cal Newport's World Without Email

Hey friends, welcome back.

What if I told you that the whole way you are likely reading this newsletter right now (in your email inbox [sorry, web browser people]) is a product of an un-thoughtful medium shift that happened nearly 30 years ago?

Last week, in our summer reading list, I dropped a reference to Cal Newport’s A World Without Email. In his book, Newport focuses on an element from the work of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman that we’ve examined before: the notion of rearview mirror thinking.

As a refresher, McLuhan noted:

We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.¹

Elaborating, Neil Postman helps us understand a bit more.

The assumption that a new medium is merely an extension or amplification of an older one; that an automobile, for example, is only a fast horse, or an electric light a powerful candle. To make such a mistake… is to misconstrue entirely how television redefines the meaning of public discourse. Television does not extend or amplify literate culture. It attacks it.²

So the big picture is we typically don’t understand all of the effects of a new medium. We typically conceive it at first as a new form of an older medium: a car as a faster horse, etc. But in time, new media ultimately don’t stay so contained (we thought about this a lot in our discussion about Netflix).

Newport pulls in this notion to describe the overall and unintended transformation that email and electronic communication have introduced in the way we work. Newport introduces the concept of the Hyperactive Hive Mind to describe the overall workflow created by the world of email:

A workflow centered around ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services.³

According to Newport, the hive mind is a process that leaves us in a constant state of distress. Our obligations to other people are generally floating around in a 24-message email thread between 13 people, and we have to have an expedition to extricate them from their eternal tomb.

Most of the book makes the case that the hive mind is real, how we got to it, and how to address it. In his conclusion, Newport revisits Postman, citing a word of caution Postman gave in an address in 1998 (quoted below in full from Postman’s address):

Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. I can explain this best by an analogy. What happens if we place a drop of red dye into a beaker of clear water? Do we have clear water plus a spot of red dye? Obviously not. We have a new coloration to every molecule of water. That is what I mean by ecological change. A new medium does not add something; it changes everything. In the year 1500, after the printing press was invented, you did not have old Europe plus the printing press. You had a different Europe. After television, America was not America plus television. Television gave a new coloration to every political campaign, to every home, to every school, to every church, to every industry, and so on. (emphasis mine)⁴

This is a helpful reminder for us today. Our natural inclination to walk “backwards into the future” can leave us blind to the more fundamental changes that technology is slipping under our noses. Newport’s book is a great call to pause and reflect on what those changes actually are and how we can more mindfully approach their use.

So the next time you open that ridiculous email thread you've been avoiding or hit that search in your Slack messages, think about what implications your communication is having on future you.

Hope this email finds you well 😉

1. The Medium is the Massage, 75

2. Amusing Ourselves to Death, 83-84

3. A World Without Email, xvii

4. Neil Postman in a 1998 Address