Get cracking and kill those e-mails

Maybe it was inevitable: The backlash against the high-tech ideal of staying connected 24/7 – with its constant e-mailing, texting and phoning – has begun. Friday’s Washington Post reported on the growing phenomenon of “e-mail bankruptcy” as individuals struggle to stay afloat in an ocean of electrons screaming for their attention.

It works like this: You reach a point where you’re overwhelmed with an inbox of thousands of e-mail messages you haven’t been able to read, much less respond to. There’s no way you’ll ever dig yourself out of e-mail “debt.” So you simply declare e-mail bankruptcy, saying you intend to make a "fresh start" with a clean, empty inbox. How do you declare this? By sending out a mass e-mail, naturally. Probably to a lot of people who won’t have time to read your e-mail, either. Ain’t technology grand?

It’s not a new concept. As the Post reports, MIT prof Sherry Turkle came up with the phrase in 1999 while doing research for a book about technology’s effect on people. Turkle still hasn’t finished the book – probably because she spends so much time reading e-mail, she jokes.

Many of us know how she feels. I routinely come into work to find about 100 e-mails – most from hucksters, wacko conspiracy theorists and other types of liberals. Come back from lunch, and there’s another 30 or so. At home, I may get another 50-100 a day. Most go unread, piling up. Thank goodness for free Web mail accounts with 2-gigabyte storage.

Good thing the powers that be here at the Enquirer haven’t supplied me with a Blackberry so I can check e-mail while I’m walking the dog or brushing my teeth. Then I might have to take advantage of Rick Ueno’s services. Ueno, general manager of the Sheraton Chicago, created a stir last summer by offering to take over-connected guests’ Blackberrys – fondly called “Crackberrys” by some users – and lock them up in the hotel safe, free of charge. Presumably, if their owners demand them back while they’re still checked into the hotel, desk personnel will refuse them for their own good – like you might do with any addict.

And addicts they are. When Yahoo! tech blogger Christopher Null posted an item about Ueno’s gambit, his readers posted (probably via Blackberry) comments like this:
“I often check my phone for the heck of it … and often times I feel it vibrating when its not even in my pocket … is something wrong with me???”
“Got it so bad I’m out in the middle of a stream Trout fishing last week fishing and reading my emails!”
“I have been threatening to run my boyfriends crackberry over since he got it. Sometimes I feel like cracking him with it!”

Whew. Ueno must be onto something. I think I’ll write him a nice note. Just as soon as I finish killing out all these e-mails.

P.S. In the time it took me to write this, 16 new e-mails hit my inbox.