An insight from William Gibson
posted by Nathan Zeldes on March 13, 2007
Just finished reading William Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition” (and I highly recommend it, if you’re into Gibson). Anyway, I noticed a sentence in this book that goes “Reflexively, like a slot player pulling the lever in hope of bringing down a better reality, she clicks hotmail in case another message has arrived in the meantime”.
This rang a bell because it is precisely what Prof. Gloria Mark of UC Irvine, one of the recent Infomania Workshop attendees, had told me in one of our fascinating discussions of interruptions: she’d conjectured that email is like the slot machines in Vegas – one checks and rechecks the Inbox in the hope of finding a recently arrived “good one” and getting a “high” as a result. Gloria actually plans to do some research to confirm this intuitive observation.
Which goes to the question many people ask me when I come up with my more aggressive solutions to the problem: why not simply tell the user to only check email twice a day? If you explain the benefit to them, surely they’ll do it? And I always say, some might, but for a good many it’s as likely as an addict kicking a habit – or, as Gibson and Prof. Mark have independently perceived, a gambler leaving that lever alone. I can’t wait for Gloria to finish that research and give us some hard data on this matter…
Comments (8)
tagged: email, infoglut, infomania, information overload
Comments
Mar 13 | Jeff Moriarty said:
Gibson is a talented writer, and Pattern Recognition is perhaps my favorite of his books. I think some of the concern is that for most addictions to be “cured”, there has to be some admission that the person is addicted. They have to admit they have a problem.
No matter how well motivated your intentions, without that admission you are just staging a forced intervention. That will tend to make people defensive and very likely to revert back to their old behavior afterwards.
Mar 13 | Josh Bancroft said:
That’s a good point. I read my email (and feeds!) compulsively, like an addict. I never thought about it as “looking for a high” before, but that’s a good way to describe the feelings involved.
But I don’t want to be cured! :-P
Mar 13 | Eleanor Wynn said:
A paycheck is an addiction, work can be an addiction. It is true that I have always gone to both my paper (in an earlier life) and my online mailboxes with the hope of winning a million dollars, or getting an important personal piece of luck or attention. And there are enough rewards that this actually pays off, in smaller increments of $5, $10…$100 “prizes”: an invitation to talk, a valuable piece of information. In my ages old doctoral dissertation I did conversation analysis of office workers chatting/communicating/problem-solving. It is all mixed together in one social context of work relationships. Oh, yes, to Jeff’s point: I was involved in one real drug intervention. The intervenee slipped out the back door the minute the “intervention” ended. You can’t “control” your way out of a situation like this, especially if it is not your own habit. Assuming that e-mail is an addiction. Geez, let’s not medicalize or stigmatize our main communication channel for an 85,000 person workforce. E-mail is a neural network that people are tuned into, for some very good and very productive reasons. What I want to know is why we feel compelled to answer these allegations against our communications lifeline?
Mar 14 | Nathan Zeldes said:
Ah, Eleanor… the brain is also a neural network that people put to some excellent uses, yet if a brain tumor develops, we excise it without considering this a stigmatization of the healthy part. Nobody is advocating eliminating email, or any useful part of it; my entire crusade is for removing the harmful, useless part of email traffic, so people can once again benefit fully and exuberantly from this incredibly useful killer application.
Mar 14 | Intelwife said:
While in a perfect world, it would be nice if employees were able to get away from the edge of the cliff that is email, there unfortunately are groups that are not going to be able to function properly or do a timely service to their end users if they do not access their accounts often. Especially those that support the server environments. It would be a great situation if all employees could somehow magically turn off the computer when their work day ends, but in a company that has a follow the sun mentality, is that even a reasonable expectation? Nice in theory, but in reality, not so much. Not in a global economy I am afraid. Thoughts, please?
Mar 15 | Nathan Zeldes said:
Are you saying, Intelwife, that if a company is global it has a right to invade employees’ private lifetime? And that this is inevitable?
Apart from being morally wrong, this is quite unnecessary. Of course some stuff requires 24 hour support, but that only means the company has a duty to staff up with 3 shifts; and this is actually far easier when you can “follow the sun”: when our folks in Folsom go home, support can switch to Penang. If a company can’t provide timely service without taking away its engineers’ work/life balance, that company must be using a very poor service model - and will pay dearly sooner or later.
Mar 15 | Intelwife said:
In my watching my husband’s experiences within Intel, it has appeared to me that in every department that he has ever worked in there has never been enough staff to do the work that has to get done. So the staff that is there work longer than the usual 8-5 to do to the things that need to get done. The only time that he has ever not been in this position was when he has in a Fab. No company should have the right to do that, but sometimes things happen. And with the oncall coverage that has to happen it does seem inevitable that one is sometimes at the beck and call of Intel at one time or another. When folks in Folsom go home, yes that can happen, first level of support is Penang and second and third level doesn’t necessarily follow the sun. It often falls to those people who live in the general vicinity who are on call. And yes that can and sometimes does impact on work/life balance. But what can you do? You take care of the call, and you move forward and live life. All part of the day.
Mar 15 | Nathan Zeldes said:
Of course, we do work long hours at Intel. I always have, even when I was in a Fab; and that was before e-mail had arrived. And I agree that there are escalations that can’t be delayed at any hour. But I expect these to be an exception, and a rare one. Feel free to email me if you see cases where it has become the norm…