It's also one of the worst culprits in a growing global lack of focus, says Maggie Jackson, author of the recently published book "Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age."
"We're highly connected," Jackson says, "yet we're connecting in thinner, more faceless ways. We experience fewer visits, fewer telephone calls, fewer contacts all around -- except e-mail. We're subsisting on this diet of snippets and glimpses of each other socially."
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday, August 02, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 92 words Type of Material: Correction
E-mail: An article in Thursday's Section A about a backlash to e-mail said that the research firm Basex calculates that unnecessary e-mail and instant messages take up 28% of the average knowledge worker's day, and that this did not include "recovery time." The worker's recovery time -- the time it takes to resume work at the point it was interrupted -- is actually included in the 28%. In addition, the article stated that Basex's calculations will be reported in a study to be published in October. The study was published in 2005.
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."
Lately, a mini-industry has sprung up around finding solutions to e-mail overload. Hazarika's ClearContext software firm has developed a program that manages Outlook, for example, offering features including a "do not disturb" button, an automated "unsubscribe" feature and an optimized folder filing system.
