So what does it mean?

Did I learn anything, or just irritate myself and those around me?

Yes and yes.

I learned that e-mail has taken a quantum leap up the scale of importance in our lives since I did my "The e-mail's down!" study a few years ago. Then, we found that a sizable portion of people still considered e-mail an new invasion of their privacy -- something they viewed as a "necessary evil." Now it has take on the status of a utility -- much like cable television did.

There was a time when cable was seen as a luxury -- something you subscribed to to get BETTER television reception. Now most Americans get cable and have no antennae for their television with which they could glean free broadcast. Cellular telephone is close to the same status.

For many of the people I talked to during my week-long fast, the idea of going without e-mail was akin to going without air -- absurd. Cutting off IM or eliminating e-mail in the evening might be similar to going without beer or chocolate, but total deprivation of e-mail seemed out of the range of reality.

I also learned that I actually have more control of my own habits than I thought. I pulled it off -- and didn't get fired or booted from civilized society. And I gave myself many ideas of how to control my e-mail:
--Unsubscribing to mailing lists
--Not responding to students and co-workers at night
--Deleting anything in my mailbox I can't use or file at this minute (If it is an e-mail file, someone else will have it stored on their server.)
-- Waiting at least an hour to respond to someone. I'm far to quick on the draw, which results in overly harsh words and resulting hurt feelings.
-- Waiting to combine my ideas into longer e-mails.

By far, the majority of e-mail messages I received over the week were not meant for my eyes alone. All but a small handful were group messages -- faculty, family, organization, etc.

I need to find ways to keep from contributing to this e-mail clutter.

When I tallied up my week's worth of messages Friday, one of the technicians in the office exclaimed "And they expect you to read all that?" Indeed. A second technician said that maybe we need "someone to pick what is most worth reading."

I replied that we call that type of person a "journalist."

E-mail is a prime suspect in modern information overload. On one hand, it is the easiest method available to send a quick message to a lot of people. On the other hand, everyone does just that. On one hand, we expect that everyone will read any message we send. On the other, we look at our own inbox and dash for the delete key.

There is challenge and there is opportunity in this situation. Easy technology has led to a glut of messages that in some ways threaten the existence of traditional journalism. But that very glut might be best addressed by journalists -- people with both training and talents in sifting sanity from a sea of syllables.

And for me? I'm gladly back to the keyboard. It was a fun experiment, but I'm glad it is over.

Clyde

While you were gone ...

Even when I say nothing, I'm a popular guy.

Rather than work at this project over the weekend, I logged into my Entourage account this afternoon to clean out the dead messages and take stock of the debris.

From Monday morning to 3:30 p.m. Friday, I received 352 messages. Very few were from students, as they already knew I was off line. About a third were from someone at the University of Missouri. The rest ranged from reports on newspaper management trends to dubious offers of discount Cialis or quick mortgages.

As I was cleaning up my inbox, I unsubscribed to a half dozen newsletters and "updates." I have many more to process in my Journalism List folder, which receives items directly via a filter on my inbox.

Counting the difference

E-mail is not all talk. Today it was numbers.

I gave my students in my Strategic Communications Research class a second version of a survey Tammy McNiel devised to measure attitude toward e-mail. The same students took the original survey last week. I gave them another version this week -- after five days of no e-mail contact from me -- to see if their attitudes changed at all.

The new version also had a few specific questions about my e-mail, plus questions about the use of Instant Messaging.

I am very seriously considering the elimination of virtual office hours. I know some students love them, but I also realize they extend my work day. Perhaps I could limit them to one evening a week and also keep AIM open during certain daytime hours.

Yesterday Larry Powell talked to me about how dependent he has become on e-mail. He still runs an agency and gets 200 messages a day for work. He was surprised to get just 50 a day from the university.


We discussed the need to train journalism student to become "power" e-mail users. The toll e-mail can take on you is too great to ignore, just as the benefits are too great. We need a way to teach our students how to use e-mail as a vital part of their education.

Larry also agreed that the second technology we need to teach is online searching. I may try to work that into my research class, but it really should be introduced at the freshman level.

Blessed be the beast -- at least in video

In a small way, I cheated today.

I gritted my teeth many times and resisted the urge to sign on to my e-mail, but I could not resist when my wife looked at HER e-mail and said that our daughter was asking for a video-instant message session.

My daughter, Gillian, recently moved to Dublin, Ireland. When they moved into a new apartment, they found that the Irish notion of "quick" installation of Internet service can take weeks. Today her cable modem was installed, however.

We both have Apple iSight cameras, so we were able to establish a direct video link this morning. There in somewhat fuzzy color was my beloved daughter and my impish grandson, Briton.

It was all I could do to keep from weeping with joy.

I'm not sure where this new trend in video messaging will go, but I think it may have much the same addictive quality as e-mail. Certainly it is almost a "necessity" for families divided by jobs, school and modern life.

Imagine what this will mean to my grandson. Briton is just 2 now, but will grow up thinking that Grandpa is just a mouse click away. He can't even speak in complete sentences, but he is already able to hit keys on the computer and to position himself in front of the camera for a conversation. By the time he is 20 like my students, he will have a stockpile of communications experiences very different from them. "Normal" takes on new meaning.

Meanwhile ... I find myself looking forward to the end of this experiment. But the insight I have gained is well worth the effort.

Taking back the night

I had an unusual experience last night. I watched TV. Just watched TV.

Sure, that's what you are supposed to do, but since I installed a wireless Internet system in my house a year ago, I've watched TV with my laptop on the chair arm. I convinced myself that it was simply like a magazine and I would use it to read -- especially about subjects that the TV shows suggested.

But last night I realized that what I really do it play with e-mail. I had the computer available while watching CSI New York, but after a few minutes I concluded that I really had nothing I wanted to look up. So I just enjoyed the show.

Many years ago when I became a general manager to the East Oregonian newspaper, I was proud and elated to be given my own laptop and a cell phone. I even installed a phone jack next to my arm chair so I could dial into the office network from the living room.

After about six months, my wife pointed out at those status symbols were actually shackles that had enslaved me to my job. Instead of a "normal" managerial 12-hour day, I was actively working until midnight or the wee hours and was functionally on call 24-7. Since a newspaper is a round-the-clock operation, I often got those calls at very unsociable hours.

Now I'm trying to decide how much of my night I should take back. This year I have been signing onto AOL Instant Messenger about 8 p.m. most days to "conduct virtual office hours". In combination with student e-mail, it is very popular. But to whom do I owe my evenings, my wife or my students?

Lest we forget...

Easily used technology breeds a curious form of cultural memory.

For instance, what ever became of the fax? Or the floppy drive?

Yesterday one of the adminstrative assistants telephoned me with a panicked voice. She needed a copy of my curriculum vitae right away to send to another program.

"But with e-mail, I don't know what we are going to do. How can I get it and how can I send it to her?"

I saved my information to a cheap CD, walked down the hall to her office and handed it to her.

Anita no dummy, in fact, she saves our posteriors frequently. But like most of us, she had become so used to the speed and ease of e-mail file transfers she simply didn't recall that time oh so many (well, just a couple) years ago when all the personnel information was in paper form that had to be photocopied or faxed.

RECOMMENDATION: Keep a written list of non e-mail communications procedures. E-mail is often based on central servers -- and central servers go down. Sometimes we need simple reminders of the "hard way" to complete routine tasks. Like, talking to someone face-to-face...

Fear and e-Loathing

An e-mail "fast" has an amazing effect on one's peers.

The initial reaction of most of my colleagues was "how can you do that?" mixed with the occasional "Good luck, but I just could bear to try it." I've made a point to watch the eyes of folks when I tell them I am not available by e-mail this week. Often there is real panic in those eyes -- the "deer in headlights" syndrome.

And then there are those who are just flat angry. Fritz Cropp was livid when he told me he had to send some information to my department secretary because he could not send it to me by e-mail. He had taken the Lenten reference in my "away" message a bit too literally and launched into a lecture on how what I was doing was "just not in the spirit of Lent."

"It is not right if you are making it hard on everyone else," he explained.

An interesting point. But can we withdraw from any common practice in our society without causing hardship on our colleagues? A vegetarian makes his host search through new cookbooks. A newly reformed drinker makes his friends uncomfortable about the cocktail in their hands. And what is more obnoxious than a strident dieter?

I'm getting strong indications from my conversations of the past two days that e-mail has gone from a simple communications method to a social/physical phenomenon akin to cigarette smoking. People tell me of dashing to the computer as soon as they awake and checking it "just one last time" before going to bed at night. They say they cannot cope with the idea of not having instant access to their friends and co-workers.

In fact, the greatest "fear factor" of my experiment is the notion that the messages in my e-mail inbox won't eventually be read. "How will you know what's there?" they ask. The notion that one can ignore a message seems beyond comprehension.

Of course, we have always ignored messages. I throw away unopened junk mail almost every day (although I must admit it took several years before I could teach myself to do that). Who among us has not had a pleasant conversation with our own brain while our spouse is telling us a long and detailed story? And I know from frequent experience that students quite often ignore anything I say in a lecture.

It's not just e-mail

One early realization in this project was that an e-mail program is not just an e-mail program.

I was surprised at how dependent I had become upon the calendar and the address book in my Entourage program. I tried printing out a couple months' worth of calendar pages, but what I really missed was the constant reminders and quick access to my calendar. I think I can just be a bit less anal this week and use a paper calendar -- although I might miss a meeting or two.

The address book is another thing. I realized that since I switched from Outlook to Entourage, the program is my only source of phone numbers and e-mail address. In the old program, I could print out a pocket-sized address book that I always had in my wallet. I still have it, in fact. It is just way out of date.

I think I will have to open Entourage through the week to get addresses. That hidden attribute wasn't really part of the experiment.

I did have my first two student "panics," however. One student emailed over the weekend hyperventilating about how anyone could go without e-mail. Today I found a hand-scrawled not from C.J. Campeau asking me for a last-minute piece of paperwork after noting he tried to e-mail but "you're doing some crazy experiment for a week." He had to leave me a cell phone number to reach me...

Breaking up is hard to do

Breaking off my longtime relationship with e-mail is much harder than I imagined -- for the wrong reasons.

My disengagement started at about 6 p.m. Sunday as I sorted through my e-mail files with three goals in mind:
1 . I had to see what was "critically" pending and post my responses before cutting the cord.
2. I knew I would have to delete any extraneous files I could so that my inbox did not overload during the week. That meant looking at the 800 messages in my inbox to see what was worth savingl.
3. Last but (as it turned out) frustratingly not least, I had to set up an auto-response file that would alert senders to the fact that their message would not be read. I knew that Entourage would not do this, but that I could do it in WebMail.

Step One nearly gave me a heart attack. It seemed that every other message from the past two weeks needed an answer before the end of this week. I wrote letters of recommendation for students like crazy, sent recent photos to friends and colleagues, updated the BBC on a student project and even sent out a long note about letterboxing. Before I came to the end of my to-do "pile," I thought I would typing forever.

Step Two was the emotional killer. I was forced -- damnably forced -- to figure out what to do with all thos miscellaneous messages that were sitting in my inbox. It was easy to kill the Viagra "spam" and the reminders of faculty meetings long since past, but there were lots of messages that just seemed too "nice" to delete.

I started by carefully examing each message and filing "keepers" onto my hard drive. But about 50 files into that project, I became ruthless. First I deleted one message at a time. Then I grabbed groups of three or four adjacent messages. Finally, I switched to "by sender" view and started wiping out anything sent to me by a particular sender. In the end, I just saved a handful of files that I might want to get back to me. I also came up with a new philosophy of file management:
"If the message is REALLY important, someone else has it on their computer and can send it to me again,"

So here is RECOMMENDATION #1 from this experiment: Reset my e-mail preferences so anything more than two weeks old is automatically erased. That will force me to archive anything I reallly want. Anything missed probably wasn't important anyway.

And then there was Step Three. I swear sometimes I am haunted by demons of evil technologies. I spent a half-hour drafting this witty but informative message to be automatically returned to senders:

CALL ME
Anyone can give up coffee for Lent or carbs for Atkins -- but how about e-mail?
As part of a research project looking at that question, my e-mail has been disabled until at least Feb. 20. Your message has already been deleted from my computer, so if you really need to contact me, you will have to use telephone, mail or personal contact.
My office number is listed below. My home number is listed in Columbia, MO. If you are really desperate, call or e-mail Denise Meyers, the editorial department administrative assistant, at (573) 882-0860-- or e-mail her at MeyerD@Missouri.edu. Denise can reach me by cell phone.
You can also share my "adventure" and make comments on a special blog : http://coldturkey-clyde.blogspot.com/.

It also included my contact information.

All for naught. I spent another hour and a half trying to get autorespond program to respond. I would toggle on the "Out of office message" option, try a test and get the message. Then I would have Cecile send a test and she would get no message -- and then neither would I.

It seemed to work after I tried it again from campus, but I have to watch it. REALIZATION: If no one know your e-mail is turned off, you are in big trouble. Everyone assumes that a message tossed out into the cyber world will indeed arrive and be responded to.

Goodbye, cruel world!

Doing without e-mail is not minor inconvenience today. I've studied the impact of email on our lives -- and especially mine -- for several years. Brooke Fisher and I studied the impact of a campuswide e-mail outage. Anca Micu and I took a hard look at attitudes towars "spam." Now I am overseeing a thesis by Tammy McNiel that looks at the e-mail relationship between professors and students.

This is not really a Lenten activity, but the sacrifices my more religious students and colleagues make certainly inspired it. This past year, Ena Salmeen completed her doctoral comprehensive examinations while honoring her Muslim faith with a dawn-to-dusk Ramaden fast. I also came to know and admire three visiting Catholic priests/journalism scholars from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. Giving up e-mail seems trival compared to sacrificing family life.

It's just a week, but my digital fast should give me a better idea of what e-mail means to my life, and perhaps how much it has taken over that life.