The Tyranny of E-Mail – a book by JOHN FREEMAN

Yesterday night around 3AM, I finished the reading of this book recommended by my supervisor professor Adrian. I was inspired and it clearly shows what we are missing in today’s sophisticated communication systems, especially emailing. He compared communicating with emails with face-to-face communication and presented several key points to remember when we are dealing with email. Furthermore, he theorized the importance of physical togetherness and touch for the human beings, especially for children’s.

He has gone through the history of communications and its developments in a nice manner in the mid of the book prior to coming to the current trends in remote communications. In addition, he coined a new term to me “slow communication”, which is a nice and meaningful term for many of the knowledge workers nowadays.

“We are here for a short time on this planet, and reacting to demands on our time by simply speeding up has canceled out many of the benefits of the Internet, which is one of the most fabulous technological inventions ever conceived. We are connected, yes, but we were before, only by gossamer threads that worked more slowly. Slow communication will preserve these threads and our ability to sensibly choose to use faster modes when necessary.”

more information can be found from this article written by the same author