How Email Took Over the World with Anne Helen Petersen

How did the information superhighway get so gridlocked? Guest Anne Helen Petersen tells Sarah the story of how email took over the world and our working lives, and what it would mean for us to get a little of our lost time back. Plus, a Kurt Loder cameo.

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Transcript

Sarah: Wonder if Ray Bradbury ever had Gmail.

Anne: Probably not.

Imagine a world where every word ever written could be viewed instantly in your home from an information superhighway. 

Internet is that massive computer network, right? The one that's becoming really big now.

 Call now for your free America Online startup kit and get free software and 10 free online hours. It's everything you need to get online. Welcome. You've got mail. 

Sarah: Hello, I'm Sarah Marshall. Welcome to You’re Wrong About.  Today we are talking about email with Anne Helen Peterson. I realize we've talked about some scary topics on this show, but this one leaves them all behind, to quote The Princess Bride.  

The question I really wanted to answer in this episode is how did the technology go from something exciting and fun and seemingly something that would allow us to connect and communicate more with people, turn in a mere 20-25 years into the rust on the machinery of all of civilization? Sorry if that sounds dramatic. That means we're also talking about the technologies that email shaped and that shaped email in turn. And ultimately the technological world that we live in today, and what it means to try and live and work and communicate in 2022.  

Anne Helen Peterson, my guest today, is a writer and public intellectual. She currently writes the newsletter Culture Study, which is one of the few things that I'm happy to receive in my inbox. And I thought she would be the perfect person to talk us through this strange, scary, ultimately hopeful story of technology and work and the future we have to try and build. So I hope this episode gives you a feeling of relief. If this is an area of stress for you, and if you're waiting on an email from me, I'm very, very sorry.

Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the show where sometimes we talk about a topic that is of great relevance to literally everyone listening to this, I promise. I'm Sarah Marshall, and this is Anne Helen Peterson. Hello. 

Anne: I am so happy to be here to talk about my biggest foe in the world. 

Sarah: And Anne Helen Peterson, for those who don't know who you are, inexplicably, to me are very famous. Who are you and what do you do?

Anne: I am a culture writer. I used to work for Buzzfeed News, and before that I was a college professor. And I have a PhD in media studies. I have written four books, and the most recent I wrote with my partner is called, Out of Office: the Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home. And the only thing famous about me that I feel like you would really appreciate, is three days ago Josh Charles retweeted me. 

Sarah: Yes. I appreciate that so much. 

Anne: I think most people know if they have any familiarity with either of our work that we are prime millennials, and thus have a certain positionality towards email. So I just want to start with some nostalgia to get it out of the way, so that we don't continually go back to this, ‘but do you remember when an email ruled?’

Sarah: You know, what Springs to mind immediately when I think about email nostalgia? That when I was, I think in sixth grade, so this would've been 1999 or 2000, I discovered ecards. Often like a little animated, like a GIF basically. And I remember setting one where the theme was Conga- rats, like congrats, but it was little rats and a conga line. 

Anne: They had like small animations, and they often played eight-bit sound. 

Sarah: Yeah. I feel like the two concepts that the internet, certainly AOL was sold to us on as I recall it, was, you can talk to anyone in the whole world at any time, and you can shop at any time.

Anne: Depending on where you lived was a massive bonus. It changed our worlds. But did you flirt on email? 

Sarah: I think probably I was flirting on email like 10 years before I was flirting in real life.

Anne: Yes. 100%, same. Yeah. I am an elder millennial, so I was born in 1981, and I was a senior in high school when you were sending conga rat emails. But I started using email actually when I was in junior high, because my mom taught math at the local college. We had a book that was the Internet for Dummies, essentially. I don't think it was one of the standard yellow books, but it was along those lines.  It taught you about, what is a BBS? What is an FTP. What are listservs? All these ways that people navigated the internet before we had search engines.

And I was a precocious junior high kid and taught myself some stuff. And I also saw in the back of the book, it had all of these email addresses listed for famous people, which is wild. But I guess not that different from the way that you would buy a fan magazine and would have the actual street address, not their real address, but their fan mail address.

Sarah: We’ve just always found ways to be weird towards celebrities. So that's consistent. That's nice.

Anne: So seventh grade me from my mom's email address, emailed Kurt Loder and Bill Gates on the same email. 

Sarah: On the same email!

Anne: And I said, Bill Gates, why don't you donate more of your money to charity? 

Sarah: Oh, that's so great. 

Anne: Sarah, he responded.

Sarah: Bill! What did he say? How did this go? 

Anne: He was like, actually I donate a lot of my money to charity. I think this was the early days of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, or what became the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Sarah: He's like, I'm a very normal married man with a very normal married marriage.

Anne: But that's my very early email story. None of my friends had email until late high school. I remember I had a group of friends that I would regularly exchange long, interesting emails with. And you would fire up the modem and it would make the modem sound, and you had to figure out what is a healthy amount of time to wait between logins. Because you knew that it felt better when there was more mail there. 

Sarah: Yeah. That's the central paradox. And I think that what makes your story believable to me that you literally just cc’d Bill Gates and Kurt Loder and they all got on the chain, is that I bet each of them were getting maybe 12 emails a day. 

Anne: Right. You know, this was the novelty of email at that time was that there were very few of them. And I started my first long distance relationship with someone who had already gone off to college. We started flirting via email and exchanging long emails. And that felt really special to me.

Sarah: I just watched the Social Network for the first time. I still think of it as a relatively new movie. It came out 12 years ago. 

Anne: It feels very new to me. 

Sarah: You know, that takes place in 2003, 2004. I went to college. I started college in 2006. It's incredibly hard to get back to a time when Facebook was cool. But it was. 

Anne: It was absolutely the coolest.  

Sarah: And I would write these emails to my friends back home and it was like, it felt very Little-Women-y, to be honest. 

Anne: It was epistolary in a really interesting way that required each of us to document our lives in sort of an artful way. Right. You had to craft a rendering of what was happening in your life and that took time and thought. You wanted to be witty, but also emotional. And it just, it took time. 

My college email, when we first arrived, there was no way to access it using what we now think of as a web client. We used Telnet to access our email through an FTP server. I think this is correct, but we just called it Telnet, and all of your emails came in black and white. There were no images, there was nothing to complicate other than the words on the screen, you didn't even have threading the way that we think of this. And we'll talk about this, you know, as we keep going about how Gmail changed all of this stuff. 

But you also had a function in this email client, where you could type in ‘finger’ and then the person's email address, the first part of their email address, and it would tell you the last place that they logged on to check their email. So it was like read receipts many years before read receipts. And also, you know, someone who said, “Oh, I'm not back in the country yet.” This is after studying abroad, we fingered him. He was in Montana. He was totally back. And so it just created this sort of oh, I sent this email, I don't know if they've received it yet. Have they read it? Did they read it and not respond to me? 

Sarah: The drama. 

Anne: That sort of drama. But it was for much longer missives than what we used for text messages. 

Sarah: Do you know what else was great? *69. Something I used to do when I taught comp classes, that didn't maybe fit with comp as well as if I were teaching a class on this, somehow was just show commercials from different time periods to try and get a sense or give students a sense of this is what people dared to dream to imagine. And so like one, actually let's just watch one. Okay. I'm gonna count this down. 3, 2, 1, go. 3, 2, 1, go. 

*recording*

 Have you ever borrowed a book from thousands of miles away, or sent someone a fax from the beach? Or tucked your baby in from a phone booth? You will. And the company that'll bring it to you, AT&T. 

Anne: I mean, all of those things came to pass. I don't know how great they are though. 

Sarah: Because yeah, you better be able to tuck your baby in from a phone booth, because you're gonna have to, for two years.

Anne: So do we want to backtrack now that we've been nostalgic about email? 

Sarah: Now that we've given email the honor it deserves, which is yes, you're a beautiful thing like the fire, and we are arsonists. So let's hear the story of the arson. And I mean, I want to know when was email invented? How long has email been with us?

Anne: The way that the development of email is generally narrativized is that it started in the 1960s, and was only available to people to essentially send a message to other people who are using the same computer. It was effectively the same as leaving a sticky note on the computer itself.

Sarah: So why invent it?

Anne: Right. I think there was one of those things where they were just like, how do we experiment with things that this computer can do? In 1971, this guy named Ray Tomlinson is generally credited with inventing networked email, and something called ARPANET, and using the @ sign so that it would teach the computer how to guide the email to the server. 

Throughout the seventies and the eighties, it was really something that was used by essentially people who were interested in tech, but then also people who worked for the military, people to some extent who worked in governmental agencies, people who worked in education and sub capacity higher ed. But I don't think that it really caught on in any meaningful way outside of those parameters until the development of AOL.

Sarah: When I think of the beginning of the internet for me, I think of AOL, because that's how my family first got the internet. To me the two key things about AOL was that it was a user-friendly way to access the internet. And that was how it was sold. And as far as I can tell, it really did work. And normal adults and old people and kids could navigate it and were very enthusiastic about it. Also that AOL sent you floppies, and eventually CDs, with new versions of the software once every 25 minutes, it was incredible. 

Anne: Yes. And they always promised ‘10 free hours’. 

Sarah: That's right. 

Anne: Yeah. And then you could stop and then you could do your trial again. 

Sarah: Right. Good ol’ AOL. 

Anne: If you had a PC at home in some capacity, which was not something that most people had for a long time, but if you did, you could load this on there and you could monopolize your family's phone number for hours on end and really piss off your parents and access this other world. And part of it was email and part of it was the chat rooms. And part of it was like dinking around in these weird spaces for sports and entertainment and all that sort of thing. 

But what starts to happen around the late nineties, and I think it was less of a thing for us because we were younger, but you start to get what we think of now as spam. And you also start to get mass emailing. So the way I want to think about email as we progress through this conversation, it's not that email in and of itself has ever changed, right? It's always just a way to communicate digitally. It is electronic mail, but its function has changed, where it can travel has changed, the way that we think of it in our lives and within this larger sphere of work has changed. All of these other characteristics, contextual things about it have changed. And so we can look at these various shifts as ages of deterioration in terms of our relationship to email. And so the first one happens when people realize that they can direct market at incredibly low cost. 

Sarah: When does that happen? Really early, I bet. 

Anne: Well, you know, people were using email as listservs, as user groups, very early on, especially around fandoms. If you look at the history of any of the long-term fandoms around, say like Star Trek or Star Wars or whatever, they had these really rich listservs and user groups where people made meaning around these texts. And I think in really pretty interesting ways. I actually asked online earlier today. I said, if you were born before 1980, when did the feeling of email begin to change for you? And one of my friends, Siva, who is a media studies professor at UVA, he said that it changed for him in the mid-nineties when his discussion USENET board around Melrose Place, which was dominated by graduate students, and got dominated by high school students. So that changed the character of email.

Sarah: For me, my formative high school experience was being part of the Newsies fandom on fanfiction.net. Fandom is just clearly one of the most vital forces in the universe. 

Anne: Yeah. Yes. And it has such a long history too but was facilitated in such meaningful ways by you being able to find other people who liked Newsies. Because I never would've found other people who liked the things that I liked living in my small town.

Sarah: Right. In order to find people in real life who like Newsies, you have to go around advertising yourself as someone who likes Newsies. Which is not the hardest thing to do, but it's still pretty hard when you're 15. 

Anne: But it’s easy if you have this locating beacon on the internet.

Sarah: Which is also, I guess, how the spread of white supremacy works. The way radicalization on the internet works, there are similar forces to deepening your interest in something that will work out to be really positive for you will happen. The anonymity of it and the idea of suddenly finding yourself in a crowd of entirely like-minded people. 

Anne: Anything that I think of in my life as like a technological advance, I then think of all the ways that it has been used in destructive ways, too.

Sarah: I mean, it does make me think that the story of email really begins when Prometheus stole the internet from the gods and then brought it to humans. And the gods were like, “Foolish Prometheus. They cannot be trusted.”  

Anne: So if you're a marketer, you are trying to get your product in front of the eyeballs of people who would buy it. And what you would do before is you would make literally thousands of mailers. And you would pay for bulk mailing, which is very expensive, and you would just send it to people hoping that they don't end up in the trash in any capacity. You are getting an incredibly low return on your advertising dollar, but there aren't a lot of other options. I mean, you can advertise in the newspaper and magazines, that sort of thing. But if you want to do direct marketing, your options are small and expensive. 

But if you figure out how to get people to give you their email address if they buy from you, and now with all of those other email addresses that they have, they can send the same thing that they would've printed out and paid postage on to every single person.  

Sarah: And then everyone sees a sweater. 

Anne: So if you read, there's a bunch of histories of email written from the perspective of mass marketing, that look at this late 1990s really early two thousands period as the beginning. We can reach so many more people. And even if your open rate is 5% to 10%, which is oftentimes what it is, it's still better than the costs that you were getting for mass mailers. 

Sarah: So one of the things I find so exhausting about being a consumer today, and I know we'll get to this later, is like when you buy something now, you enter into a sacred trust with the company you bought it from. And they email you every day for the rest of your entire life. And they will follow you wherever you go, and you cannot escape. The way my attention is being preyed on by everything that crosses the threshold of any of my inboxes, basically any email I get, I start internally screaming. 

Anne: No one has more consistency in my life than West Elm. 

Sarah: That's why the Caleb thing is so ironic.

Anne: If I woke up in the morning and didn't have an email from West Elm, I would want to check in. Are you okay? But it wasn't always that way. When marketers began to figure out that email could be a real site to connect with consumers, is when the inbox begins to overflow. The other thing that happens during that time, around this time, is you start getting more and more forwards. This was something that I remember getting early on and how misinformation spread. 

Sarah: Like someone's grandma almost got abducted at a Home Depot parking lot. 

Anne: Or you know what used to be chain mail. Chain mail, for those who are not familiar, is operated through the actual mail. And you would get a letter from someone who is part of it and it would say, you need to send this mail to 20 people. And sometimes it would be some sort of scam involved. But most of the time it was like, “Say where you're from and let's see if we can get this letter to all seven continents”. And that crossed over onto email of, “forward this, and if you don't, your house will is self-distruct” or something like that. 

Sarah: And it becomes so stressful to maintain when you have to save your house from exploding three times in a morning.

Anne: And when your grandma follows up to say, “Did you get that forward that I sent you? Just checking in!”

Sarah: I remember an email going around. It had to have been in 2003, so I would've been in 10th grade. And a friend of mine who was also in 10th grade called absolute bullshit on it, which I love that I was friends with such critical thinkers. At the time I was like, this seems nonsensical, but I don't know. But it was the one, I'm sure you got. It was like, men are preying - it was like either implicitly or explicitly - men of color are preying on women who wear overalls and have long ponytails. Because if you have a long ponytail, they can grab you by your ponytail and get you in the van. So don't wear a long ponytail. And you get all these emails that were like, never wear a long ponytail. 

Anne: I mean, that's a panic over all sorts of things. But I think calling attention to the way that this early email functioned in a way that's not dissimilar from Facebook in terms of spreading panic. It was a site of that as well. But it still was not overwhelming. And that shift really happens with Gmail. And that happened in 2004.

Sarah: And Gmail also used to be cool. What the heck?

Anne: Gmail used to be exclusive, which is something that I think people forget. So pre-Gmail, people access their email primarily through a local server, whoever they got their internet through. And it was slow and clunky. AOL, or they had Hotmail or Yahoo. And it's hard to remember again that those services were really slow. They were clogged with banner ads oftentimes, which were slow to load. If you clicked into another one it was weird, and they also did not have threading. And this is so fascinating to try to return to this time before threading. So every time someone replied to you, it would be a separate email. 

Sarah: It's fascinating to me that I have no memory of that. And that must have been how I communicated for half my life. 

Anne: And it would have created more email in theory, right. That you have a separate email for every single reply.

Sarah: And yet, I bet it's like an impulse by [inaudible], if you're just like, well, it's already this endless ongoing email. So it changes the nature of the conversation, I guess. 

Anne: So do you know how Gmail was announced? 

Sarah: No. 

Anne: So, do you know how Google just generally has April fool jokes? 

Sarah: I feel like I know so little about the lore of all these scary guys who control our lives.

Anne: So in 2004, they had two April fool jokes, or seemingly two April fool jokes. And one was something along the lines of, we're hiring on the moon. But the other one was, we're going to give email with a capacity of one gigabyte to everyone. And that seems very small now, but at the time that was 500 times more than what you got with Hotmail. You had to delete stuff constantly in order to keep your inbox essentially viable. And I think that's part of the reason why a lot of people don't have much evidence of their pre-Gmail inboxes in any capacity, because you had to actually delete things. So I have a bunch of emails that I printed out. I have physical copies of emails from my college years because I wanted to remember. 

Sarah: Yeah. And because it'll be easier to write a biography of you this way. 

Anne: Yeah, they'll go in my archive, but I'll keep them close until I die or whatever. 

Sarah: Yeah. That's the classy thing to do. 

Anne: Or with a gig of memory, it changed the way that people even thought about organizing their email. And why did Google want to do that?

Sarah:  Why did they want to do that? 

Anne: So that they could search your email constantly and advertise to you. And there was actually, there was pushback on this originally. They very purposefully tried to be unobtrusive with the way that they marketed to you. So there would be the tiny little ad on the top that's like, if you had been emailing about concert tickets, they would advertise concert tickets to you, but not in a banner ad.

Sarah: This is like if someone's doing like a Cyrano de Bergerac on you or whatever, where they're they've done all this research on you, but they don't want it to be obvious that they're secretly learning about you. But they're like, well, I was going to the Bluegrass festival on Saturday. And you're like, oh, I love bluegrass. What a coincidence? I feel very secure with this email platform. 

Anne: Yes. Yes. Well, it's the way that I think the erosion of privacy works in so many cases that there was pushback against this for several years. That people were like, it's creepy that you're reading my email. And then like Amazon, like search, like all of these things, people gradually became accustomed to. Oh, well I'm better marketed too now, so I'm okay with giving away my data in that way. 

Sarah: Wonder if Ray Bradbury ever had Gmail? 

Anne: Probably not. 

Sarah: He probably did. He was probably like, well, it is the fastest, everybody.

Anne: When did you switch over to Gmail?  

Sarah: I remember getting it in probably 2005. And I remember it was when. I don't know exactly how this worked, but I had a friend who, for some reason, had a finite number of Gmail invites and you had to get one from somebody. And so I got one from her. And so it felt like finding a dragon egg or something. 

Anne: Yes. This is totally how it was similar to early Facebook in some ways except that older people could get in on it. Some of these very early invites were auctioned off and people wanted that sweet Gmail so badly that they would pay many thousands of dollars.

Sarah:  Isn't that incredible to imagine now, right? It's, please give me the email. I mean, people would do that today, too. 

Anne: Yes, they would.

Sarah: Anyway, moving on. 

Anne: And so when people lose any sort of restrictions on the amount of email that you can send, or even, if you're a market, you had to tread that fine line of if I send too many emails, it's gonna take up too much space and the person's gonna try to unsubscribe to my email list. But now that their inboxes are what felt like infinite, it doesn't matter how much I send, because they can just archive those things. 

Sarah: Metaphorically, it's like before everyone had this nice little house they lived in, just a little bungalow. And that was where you could put all your stuff. And the amount of digital stuff you could have was just limited by that size. And then one day everybody was given a mansion. And at that point you're like, well, sure. I'll just take anything. I'll just keep anything anyone gives me because I have all the space, who even cares.

Anne: And you can get it a lot faster too. This is another thing that I didn't know previously. That the way that email loads on a computer, and I'm not going to try to attempt to describe it. But basically, it's using a different route through the internet to load. It has to do with things called IMAP and this sort of thing. 

Sarah: Yeah. So it takes a different route via Gmail then, okay. 

Anne: It takes the direct route instead of the roundabout page loading forever route. So that means that your experience of email, especially of Gmail, feels immediate. I remember this when I was using Yahoo mail. When you clicked back to your inbox, it would take a while for it to load. 

Sarah: The thing about computers in the nineties is that they were like, they were very vulnerable. They were large and they would whirr, and they would get really dusty really easily. You had to cover them up at night, sometimes. You would cover up the keyboard and be like night, night. You know, you would have to protect them from dust. Just these large sort of fragile objects that would work really hard and get really hot because they were just whirring and churning and clicking. And they were just trying to show you your email. 

Anne: And there were so many working parts, right? You had the tower and then the monitor and the keyboard. Or, you know, the really cool Macs that came out in the early 2000’s that had the different colors. 

Sarah: Oh my God, what a moment. It was incredible.

Anne: Yeah, so the other thing that starts to happen in the early two thousands is email starts to become mobile in a way that it absolutely was not. You could have a desktop and check your email there. But I remember we used to go onto campus to check our email once a day. And people had laptops, but it still was not coming with you when you left your computer in any capacity. 

And you know, when I asked that question on Twitter about when did your experience of email start to change? So many Gen-X-ers said, as soon as I got a Blackberry.

Sarah: Did PalmPilot have email? Remember when PalmPilot was huge? Miranda Hobbes had a PalmPilot. 

Anne:  I think that they're all the same time. The way you would access email on a PalmPilot or a Blackberry looked a lot more like how I accessed Telnet email back in the late nineties. But what mattered was that it was there. 

And I think the fact that these devices were adopted so swiftly by particularly the American industries that are such champions of overwork is not coincidental, right? They're like, what's another way that we can force people to work all the time, even in what used to be the few interstices of their day that were inoculated from work in some way. Going from one place to another, being at your kid's soccer game, any sort of obligation outside of work now becomes accessible for colonization by work. That is what mobile email does. 

And this is even before what we think of as the modern smartphone, which allows you to browse all sorts of places and check Twitter and blah, blah, blah. This is just having email correspondence available on your phone. 

Sarah: One of the concepts of organized labor is that you have eight hours of work and eight hours of leisure and eight hours of sleep. One of the questions and one of the things I mean when I say, let's talk about email and how we got here is, did we run with open arms across a beach and toward getting emails all day long and the expectation that you are going to be available essentially, if you're awake, you should be answering email? 

Anne: I mean, I think it's part of this gradual change. So there's this guy, Cal Newport. Do you know who Cal Newport is? He writes in The New Yorker, he's a professor. He's an enlightened business book person. He's the sort of guy that people who think they're too smart for business books are like, but Cal Newport, really good. One of his most famous books is called, Deep Work. Part of the way that he gets a ton of work done is he does deep work. He spends days without any sort of email communication or communicagtion with anyone else. 

Sarah: Okay. I'm into this so far. 

Anne: One of his most recent books is called, a World Without Email. In that book, he lays out all of the different ways that we got to this overload. When we talk about email, what we're actually talking about is a world of hyper communication. And email is just the tool that we have used to facilitate that strategy towards work and towards productivity. And I'm pretty on board with this argument. And I think we can talk later about some of the gendered aspects of why he is able to say, I don't do email, but one of the things he says in the conclusion to this book is he quotes this very famous media theorist Neil Postman, “Technological change is not additive, it is ecological. A new medium does not add something, it changes everything.” 

And I think this is at the heart of the problem of email. Oftentimes we think of it and other technologies in its realm. And I would include Slack in here, other communication technologies, as just becoming faster. Just a different way of doing the same thing. But it actually changes the entire landscape. 

The same way that the telephone changed the entire landscape of work, or the photocopier. These are paradigm shifts and the way that work is organized. But at the same time, I think that no one has really accounted for that. And instead, thinks of it as well, it should be making me more productive. And I'm continually frustrated that all it does is absorb the time that I would otherwise be working. It creates more work instead of less.  

Sarah: And to me, one of the insidious things is that it creates different expectations. I spend a lot of my time feeling stressed that people are mad at me because I'm not able to respond instantaneously to every message that I get. And sometimes they're not and they don't care, but sometimes they are. And there's not an agreed upon standard of what is appropriate socially or to expect of somebody energetically. Because the only guideline I think we all have imposed on us is what is technologically possible? There's no real limit left at this point.

Anne: Yeah. Everything all the time. Right. So, but then I think the other shift that really changes the character of email happens with the broad adoption of smartphones is texting. All of those good parts of email, all of that flirtation, all of that narration of one’s day of once, week, they get sucked out of email and placed into text. 

Sarah: Yeah, that's true. Oops.

Anne: I don't hate text by any means, but at the same time, it just doesn't ever feel special. 

Sarah: Well, that's the thing we all know on some level that it's bad form to do something major over text, because it's a text. 

Anne: And that degradation informs of taking all the good stuff away. But then text also adds this other mode of communication. So the ways that people can get in touch with you proliferates. The number of texts that I send every day, the amount of sheer communication that I do on all sorts of Twitter DM’s, my email inbox, text, Instagram DMS. It's just coming in every single direction and there's no easy way to filter through the urgency of different requests. And this is the other thing too, right? It's a flattening. And so it just feels like everything all the time.

Sarah: And also, it's a lot of writing. If you write, and then you finish a day of looking at your DMS and your texts and your emails and sort of putting out various fires, and then you sit down and you're like, well, I've put in a full day. 

Anne: There's a tendency to brag about how - brag is maybe the wrong word - but to talk about, oh my gosh, my inbox as a way of signaling how busy you are and how hard you're working. 

Sarah: Yeah. It's misery poker. 

Anne: Yes. You know, sometimes I really like doing that emotional labor of responding to people who have sent me really long messages that are really meaningful to me. And sometimes it feels really overwhelming. Also just logistical scheduling and stuff to do with what I consider my work work, and then stuff to do with what I consider my life. All the stuff that one has to do in one's life to negotiate the world. I do feel like I need at least a solid day, if not more, to deal with my inbox every week. 

Sarah: I have a theory that Ivanka Trump converted to Judaism so she could have a day without email.

Anne: There's actually a really good book. Hold on, let me find it. Called the Sabbath World. And it's by Judith Shulevitz. It is about how the Sabbath was there for a reason. If you think about why religions come up with the way that they order things, a lot of it has to do with how we survive as a people.

Sarah: And in corporations, there is no God. There's only stockholders, and they never tell anybody to rest.

Anne: And they don't care about attrition. Right? If they can replace someone with someone else for relatively low cost, they have no stake in preserving someone from this sort of burnout that arrives from constantly dealing with email. The disaster scenario that I hear from a lot of people who are dealing with too much email, is that they spend all of their day dealing with emails and also meetings. And then they spend their evenings and their weekends doing the actual work. 

Sarah: Right. What was it like in an analog world? We did a You Are Good episode about 9 to 5 recently. And I found myself really thinking, what was that like? Because obviously it sucked. One of the themes of the movie is that it sucks. But was there the same kind of universal burnout? 

Because I think to me, the thing about email and sort of general communication and attention demands of this era technologically that it represents, is that there's never a break. Right? Beacuse I think it used to be, if you were doing what you do 30 years ago, I feel like  you would have a big article that would trend and it would go in a lot of papers and people would talk about it, and you would go on radio shows and you would get like a bag of mail. And you'd be like, boy, this is a lot of mail. And then a few weeks would pass, and it would quiet down. But today, you do something major, and you deal with a lot of communication. And the next week, nothing really happens for you professionally. So you still deal with a ton of communication because you're being screamed at by every place you ever bought a houseware from, for example.

Anne: Yes. Yeah. It's ceaseless. West Elm is still there even when you haven't published anything on the internet. 

Sarah: Right. They're like, we don't care what kind of a week you had, we are harassing you unconditionally. You bought one bowl, one time, four years ago, and you belong to us forever. 

I think that we crossed another line when they put little TV screens on the pumps at the gas station. I don't like it. Not a fan. I think I deserve those 90 seconds to myself. 

Anne: I just want the bad country radio station. That's fine with me. 

Sarah: That's a great ambience. 

Anne: Yeah, but this gets at something else though, I think, in terms of all the information all the time in the way that work has changed broadly. And this also connects with your question about what was work like? And the character of work has changed so much in part because of stockholder value and the way so many businesses sloughed off tons of labor over the course of the eighties and nineties, and then asked the remaining workers to take on the work of the workers who had left. So essentially one person doing the work that was previously shared by a lot of other workers. 

In the past, how it worked was that you had an assistant or a secretary to handle your correspondence. When I asked this question again on Twitter, “When did you change your attitude about email?” Hank Green replied and said, “I love email still.” And I said, Hank Green, you have to tell me if you have an assistant or not, be honest. And he did a little winky face back. So yeah, my experience of email would be pretty different if I had someone to deal with all of the worst parts of it. 

Sarah: Well, yeah, because then it's like, you have a farm but you're not the on-call person where it's like, the calves are birthing, it's three in the morning. Gotta birth the calves. You wake up and there's a calf and you're like, I love calves! 

Anne: I think about this with journalism, too… Have you seen Good Girls Revolt?

Sarah: No.

Anne: It's about the history of Newsweek. And specifically in like the 1960s and 70s. It highlights how journalists at that time, all of them had research assistants who were women who would do almost all of the reporting and the researching. And then hand it to the man, who was the journalist, who would write the story and then put his name on the byline.

Sarah: Of course. One of the consistent themes is whenever you're like, wow, how does that person get so much done? The answer is, probably the labor of another person. 

Anne: Yes. 100% 

Sarah: And maybe you're amazed because they're being actively hidden from you.

Anne:  So in this Cal Newport book, he is always very gracious in thanking his wife for being the person he runs all of his ideas by. But also think about if he is a person who can, I'm gonna say indulge in these periods of deep work and really figure out how to live his life without email or interruption, who's picking up that slack?

Sarah: Who's telling people he's not mad at them?

Anne: Right. He has an assistant in the form of his wife, who is making this possible for him. And so this is why as much as I idealistically love the idea, I think in our current environment there is a real privilege in who gets to ignore their email. And also, who gets to ignore Facebook, even, right? Facebook is a scourge and I hate it. And most people I know also dislike it a lot. But then so many of the moms that I've talked to have said, I would quit it in a second, but all of the information about where do I source a babysitter? When does school get out early on this early close day? And it is all coming from Facebook. They don't have the privilege of leaving a place that makes them feel bad about themselves. 

Sarah: I think the thing that's weird about the Social Network and I don't know how much we even knew in 2010. Apparently, I remember it is like a mystical, far-off time when three horns stomped through the Great Valley. But I feel like the arc and theme of that movie is wow, he's really successful, but nobody likes him. It makes you think. The end. And the point is not that nobody likes him, the point is that he's going to become like perhaps the most powerful person in America, if not the planet, just falling ass backwards into maybe destroying democracy. No, the point is not, wow, he sucks. It doesn't even matter at this point. The point is just how much power can a single person have purely because they have a good business idea, I guess. 

Anne: Right. Well, and this goes too to the fact that you can introduce a tool and think that its ramifications only have to do with one small corner of the world. Right? I think he really thinks that it just helps people connect with other people. 

Sarah: Right. So it's society, you've just created a society. 

Anne: Yeah. And he changed the ecology and refuses to deal with the ramifications. And so, I think about the guy who's credited with creating Gmail, there's this great Time Magazine profile of him by Harry McCracken. It looks at a lot of the stuff that we've discussed about how Gmail was a real paradigm shift in terms of what email would look like. But then in 2014, the author of this piece is trying to get a hold of the creator of Gmail, and his name is Paul Buchheit, and he can't get ahold of him because he doesn't use email anymore. This is when he finally gets a hold of him, I think over the phone, he tells the author of this piece in Time, “The problem with email now is that the social conventions have gotten very bad. 24/7 culture, where people expect a response. It doesn't matter that it's Saturday at 2:00 AM. People think you're going to respond to email. People are no longer going on vacation. People have become slaves to email.” And then he says, “It's not a technical problem. It can't be solved with a computer algorithm. It's more of a social problem.” 

Sarah: That seems to be a constant. Something that I think is a very outsized reaction to say, somebody emails you about something at one in the afternoon, and then they follow up with you at 11 the next day. And you're just like, you have to give me a day, for God's sake. It's never about something urgent either. 

Anne: Never. Both you and I are in a place where if we don't respond right away, it's not jeopardizing our careers. So it's good to acknowledge that. But at the same time I have regularly refused to respond to emails for a week. And part of it, I think, is stubbornness. And part of it is it's okay if it's super, super urgent, they'll email back and maybe I'll open it sooner, but sometimes I only have the wherewithal to get to the stack of emails once a week. And it changes it. 

Sarah: My issue with email, I was excited to talk about this with you, partly because email is just one of the great stressors in my life. I think because to me, it's come to be the site of my constant burnout around communication. Which I think the pandemic really brought out in me more because it's high effort, low reward communication if you're interacting with most people remotely. Just on a purely math level, it's more energy going out for less energy coming in. I'm already gonna be disappointing people based on where I am emotionally. And I really want to keep up with people and have people know that I'm excited that people want to talk to me or be in touch with me. 

But at the same time, it's like not only that, but because of the expectations we have, I, at my absolute best, like 100% full bars every single day, would still be disappointing everyone constantly. Because just the volume of communication is too much to keep up with and then do anything else with your time. 

We're living in this culture now where all of our time is taken up by communication, but not communication that really has any content. It's the stuff that you have to get through that is announcing itself as urgent. And you're like, once I get through all of this, then I'll actually communicate something meaningful. Well, it's 5:30. 

Anne: Yes. Well, and I think a lot of this is the result of people feeling anxiety about their inboxes, and really trying to get to things like inbox zero that inadvertently creates more work for other people. So responses that don't fully answer a question, responses that fail to answer a really pertinent part of what the email was trying to obtain in terms of availability or whatever. 

Sarah: Oh, that makes such sense. So it's like someone tosses you a ball and you're like, ah, get it away from me. I can do Tuesday! And it's like, what time Tuesday? 

Anne: Constantly. Or responses that are like “thoughts?” Just the reply all, “thoughts?” You're just trying to push it off of your plate onto someone else's plate, without realizing its gonna come back on your plate. And the food's gonna rot and it's gonna be even grosser. 

And I have personally tried a lot of strategies to try to be more thoughtful in my responses. I also am very rigorous about scheduling emails because just because I am trying to clear my inbox on a Sunday afternoon, I don't want that email arriving in someone else's inbox on a Sunday afternoon. 

Sarah: That's just considerate. 

Anne: But it doesn't change the character of email that's in my inbox. It doesn't change the dread that I feel looking at it. It doesn't change those things in the inbox that feel like my inbox of shame that I've avoided for so long that it's just embarrassing to respond to them now. 

Sarah: Right. I was looking at something earlier today that was a conversation that I had dropped the ball on 16 months ago. And I was like, that doesn't even feel like that long at this point. I would not feel that weird about picking that up and being like, hi, so I've had a rough 16 months. How are you? I feel like I can't resume communication until I'm gonna be able to actually show up to communicate. We just all have a finite amount of social energy, guys. I'm really sorry. We have technology that allows us to transmit more than we have to send, I feel like. 

Anne: Yeah. Well, and I think this is what Cal Newport really arrives at. The key gestures towards a more anthropological understanding. Which is like our tribal organization means that when someone is asking something of us, we feel like we need to provide that to them. And when we don't or can't, for whatever reason, it becomes a site of anxiety. We feel like we are letting people down, right? Whether or not the email in our inbox is actually asking something important of us, it still triggers that same mechanism. 

Sarah: I mean, just humans and the internet. I don't know. It's been a very exciting time to be alive. I'm not gonna complain about any of it really. I'm sure that in any other time in history, I would have died one of those accidental blood poisoning deaths when I was like 12 or something. So very happy with the technologies that we have that keep accident prone people alive and everything like that. But normal people these days who are on any kind of social media are potentially living in active communication with thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people who they can't see or touch or be in the same space with, but whose attention is on them. That's literally impossible to meaningfully conceptualize. The fact that we're just all living in a reality that we, I think literally, that our brains can't really make real for us. 

Anne: Well, and it's ironic that in this time, when we are ostensibly in communication with more people than ever, more people feel personally lonely, but also really isolated from the sort of strong ties that create a safety net. I think a lot of people would be like, I have a bunch of text groups. I don't know that I have anyone that I could ask to watch my kid for an afternoon. I know you've talked about this to some extent on Twitter, but we're not meant to have this many inputs from so many people in our life. 

Sarah: It's really, it's a lot.

Anne: We're not meant to be exposed to so many people's opinions. 

*recording* 

I’ll save you a trip to the library. 

That's great.

Download is easy, too. You know, I can even send email on the internet and of course there's my personal favorite, live chat. That's how I met my new kayaking buddies. We'll check that out later, after the game.

So how do you get America Online? 

Oh, that's easy, too. You just call the 800 number. 

I gotta check this out. 

Call 1-800-614-3434 now, for your free America Online startup kit with free software and 10 free online hours. It's everything you need to get online. So call 1-800-614-3434. 

Sarah: One of the things that I find hopeful about the time period that we're in, is the idea that we're forced to live - well, not everybody - but more people than before I think are forced to live with some kind of awareness of just the heightened vulnerability that we're all subject to. 

One thing I remember, and miss, was the email convention of early pandemic days when everyone was up to their elbows in sourdough. People were still emailing, but it was like, “Hi. Are you okay? Well, anyway, we have an exciting new thriller.” And what we're going through has challenged maybe for a lot of people, the implicit assumption that everybody but you is doing okay. And I do think that really good things come from more and more people getting on the page of, I'm not okay. You're not okay. How on earth could we be okay? Look at the infrastructure we're trying to live inside of. Who could possibly be okay with this?

Anne: This is where email signatures and auto responders have become valuable tools that not enough people use in an interesting way. I have one that I sometimes think is corny, but other people tell me they appreciate. Which is, “My working day may not be your working day. Please feel free to respond whenever it is your working hours again.” Trying to relieve someone of the compulsion that it is time for them to respond. 

I've seen ones that say things like, auto responders, especially that say, “I'm still pandemic parenting. I still do not have enough care and that makes it difficult for me to respond in a quick manner.” And what it does is it sets the table stakes in a way that someone could be like, oh, I'm not gonna expect something for a little bit. I emailed my accountant the other day to ask a question about something and I got an auto responder that she's recovering from an illness and if it's really urgent, I can call the office, but please be patient during this time, and thank you. Just setting the expectations in a way that made me feel like this is totally fine. I don't need this question now or in the next week. And if I do have something that's urgent, there is someone that I can reach out to. And hopefully makes my accountant also feel like she's not falling down on her job simply because she's a human and has an illness, you know? 

Sarah: And I feel like a lot of good can come from just individuals communicating. Hey, this may be technologically possible, but instantaneous response is not in my expectation of you. Are there means of systemic change for this? 

Anne: Well, the problem is that so many people and you and I are included in this, have had a total collapse of work and life in terms of we work for ourselves, right. And this is I think, going to be increasingly the norm, it's part of why we have to really rethink labor regulations. That's another conversation. 

Sarah: It's true. Because I'm really verbally abusive in the workplace to myself. And in another situation, I could have sued, you know.

Anne: You need a better HR rep for yourself. 

Sarah: I do. My HR rep is just, I don't know what the hell they're up to. Yeah. 

Anne: Your HR rep is not your friend, does not work for the company. But what that means in practice is that I don't have separate emails for work and life. I don't have separate phones or separate computers. You can't make changes in your personal life and expect them to change if you don't have those practices in place in your business life. So people too, who work for businesses in a more traditional sense, even if something changes in the way that their business does email or thinks about communication, they're still gonna have the communication of their personal life. It's all really intertwined. 

So part of me wants to encourage people to do things like, nuke an email after any sort of PTO, where you just come back and you say to yourself, if that was really important, then they'll get in touch with me again. But so much of that is predicated on some sort of stability in an industry. These are things that only people who have been in their jobs and know their worth and their jobs can do. 

Sarah: And who have other people aware of their worth, which is really the key part. It's a sign of what the workplace has become for people. And just this overwhelming degree of scarcity. If you miss this email, this could be a shot that you really couldn't afford to miss. And then that's a symptom of a much bigger problem. 

Anne: Right. Everything seems urgent and pressing all of the time. And so I think sometimes people can work on that with their companies, with their own families. This is what we use for SOS. This is what we use for just sending it your way. I don't expect a response. This is what we use for, I really would like to have a conversation with you. 

Sarah: This is a nice one, because this forces us to talk about our feelings and stuff, and what we expect from communications with the people that we love. If there's someone you love, then you can talk to them. If it's a company, then yeah, you really can't have a conversation with the company. 

Anne: But you can't with your manager. Right? Every time your manager does that thing, where they slack you and say, when you have a few minutes, just want to chat. And that sends a spike of anxiety through you so severely. And then they don't respond back for a while and you're like, oh my gosh, am I getting fired? Are we having to talk about my performance? What is happening? And most of the time they're like, just wanted to see if we could reschedule our weekly meeting. And how can you be clear with your manager in a way that doesn't have to sound entitled just like when you do that, it really creates anxiety and makes me worse at my job.

Sarah: Yeah. And the idea here then is we need to be able to express to people who we work for how we need to be communicated with, which is something that may or may not be possible in a workplace. But I think what's clear is that it needs to be possible for us to not drown. Yeah. Slack terrifies me. I'm very lucky to have never had to have a job where I'm on Slack. I would die. 

Anne: Yeah. Well, so I had it at Buzzfeed for six years. It made me worse at my job in a lot of ways. It made me more anxious about my job, and also made me feel like I was in high school a lot. 

Sarah: And it's basically intra-office messaging. Is that how you would describe it? 

Anne: Yeah, and there's a lot of things where you feel like you have to be present on it and responding things to evidence that you are doing work so it's that sort of presenteeism, but then also performing wittiness and popularity, people respond to you in some certain way, that sort of thing. But also not being too much on slack because then you're spending too much time slacking and not working. 

Sarah: Right. So it's another means of surveillance as well, which is always fun. 

Anne: The history of Slack is really interesting because it was marketed as an email killer. It didn't kill email though. You're not gonna get rid of anything when you add another form of communication into the workforce. 

Sarah: Right? Some technologies make other technologies redundant, but right. You're not gonna kill email. Email has already won. It should be clear that if you invent a new means of technology, it's well now there's gonna be more stuff to have, to be overwhelmed by.

Anne: We have electronic mail, but we still have physical mail. We have credit cards and we can pay for things with our phones, but I still have to write checks for various things. And maybe it's where we are at this particular moment. And I think this is why millennials and Gen X feel email anxiety acutely. Because we know what it used to feel like. No matter what age you were, even if you were six before it you still know what it was like not to have these things as part of your life and not to have screens and communication as such a constant. And then you get to this point where you can remember back with nostalgia. But also, it's something I think deeper than nostalgia. I think it's more just this is a massive paradigm shift in the way that humans and civilization works. 

Sarah: Nobody really got to choose that. It was something that happened by degrees. And it was I think really largely based on this idea of well, we'll have better functionality as workers. So obviously this is good. And then you just keep saying yes to things and then you look up and here we are. And yeah, what I find so insidious about that AT&T commercial we watched. It's, imagine a world where you can travel with GPS in your car. And you're like, oh, that's nice. You can go on vacation with GPS in your car and stuff. And then it's or send a fax from a beach. And I get that it's really great to be able to do that if you have to, better to be able to than to not. But also, it's really bad to sort of be playing this utopian. And you're like, wait a minute, Tom Selleck, why are we sending faxes from the beach? This person is on vacation, right? 

Anne: There was some dubiousness around Gmail originally when it was being developed at Google in the late 1990s and early 2000s, because people just didn't think there was that much of a utility to have infinite email, but the founders got behind it. And in hindsight, people who worked on the project realized that what we thought and what worked pretty effectively was how we can impose the way that we communicate as tech workers for whom our lives are completely absorbed by work. How can we make that available to everyone else? How can we impose that style of communication on everyone else?

Sarah: Everyone else who isn't having their laundry done by Google. 

Anne: Right, right. You see a really interesting different sort of trickle down over the course of the seventies and eighties as consultants whose understanding of work was work all the time, go into these companies and are like, the people who are the best workers, the people who survive, are the people who work like me. With no vision of creativity taking on as many jobs or as expected of you. 

Sarah: And also like someone who's probably like 24 years old. The fact that it's such a young person's game, that's not good for people who aren't young. I mean, it's fun to have an all-consuming career when you're 24, because you're 24.

Anne: Your metabolism, your work metabolism is in a very different place.

Sarah: Yeah. Work. But that is what it is. It's work metabolism. Yeah. Because I used to love, I loved to go in a hole and kind of work like a demon when I was younger. The good work, creative stuff, writing. And I really don't do that anymore. And then there's the fact of you know, people start families, they want to get home and the chicken. And I think it's healthy to have a time in your life when you're extremely work oriented. And I think it's also healthy for that period to be finite. 

Anne: Yes. But then we don't have a place in society for people who don't have that sort of attitude towards work. Right. It's like beauty standards. 

Sarah: Because you're like, look at those 24 year old’s, because stay at that peak for your whole life. That's all we want you to do. It's fine. 

Anne: That is the expectation. Right? Work like you're 24 until you're 75 and then you can retire if the planet hasn't died. But I also think it's exclusionary in other ways because there are people who can still work like they're 24, and there are people who can afford to have all of those other things taken care of for them. 

Sarah: And they're high.

Anne: But whether it’s an actual person who does it for them in the form of a partner, which is often only possible if they're making enough money so that other person doesn't have to work full time. Or they're able to pay for a ton of labor, that accounts for all those other things. So I just continually come back to this idea that like the way work is built today is to promote and to incentivize like a certain strategy towards work. 

Sarah: And it's that we all are these Silicon Valley 24-year-olds. 

Anne: Yeah. If you work at Google today, I wonder if you have the same problem with email that we do now. Right. Or if they've passed it down to us and they have figured out other ways that they're communicating on a higher level, it would be an interesting way of thinking. But like it, it's created this paradigm for excellence that expels so many people. 

Sarah: And that you can either afford to be spat out or you can't afford to be spat out. I wanted to do this episode, partly because I think it's more dystopian than we can immediately afford to realize that our attention is being prayed on in this way and that it's become so normalized. 

Anne: You know, you talking about how difficult it is to re-enter that absorption cave, I feel the same and I miss it. And it's not just me, like looking back on oh, wasn't it great when I had no responsibilities, and I wasn't calling the plumber and wasn't tasked with all these things. It's more like, it's really wonderful to be deeply absorbed in something like an idea, a world, a creative notion in some capacity. That sort of absorption is life giving it. It makes us feel like, I don't know. It just textures things in a different way. 

And it's also a burnout antidote and all of my work on burnout, I always know that I'm burning out when I can't even come close to entering into that space. Can't even immerse myself in fiction or a movie. But the hard thing is that when you are deep in those spaces, you can't get your way out. Right? You know the things that will get you out of it, but they're the very things that are very difficult to access in that head space.

Sarah: The point of all this is that there's not an easy solution. We can't just be like, so turn off your iPads for the weekend, ladies or whatever, cuz it's well maybe you probably can't maybe you work for Uber. You know, what do I know? But our attention, which is one of the things that we used to have, even if we had very little else, we could at least control that, now it's been taken, basically. Yeah. And it's very hard to get it back and like you have some control over it. You probably have some control, but you probably don't have as much control as you would in a non-dystopia, I bet. 

Anne: No. Especially since everything seems to be so located on our phone, like the vast majority of people listening to this episode are listening on their phones, which means they're also listening on their email device. 

Sarah: Right. Could you even be listening to this on something that you don't also get email on? And are you getting a push notification right now? And is it from West Elm? 

Anne: The fact that you can't separate makes it really hard to exercise any sort of discipline. There are so many industries that have tried to figure out how to give us our attention back or give us back that feeling of attention. 

Sarah: Like Headspace, which is on the thing I get my email on.

Anne: Yeah. Band-Aids on bullet holes. They are not a greater solution to this larger problem, this expectation of constant accessibility. 

Sarah: I feel like there was a time when it felt like technology was giving you the power to do something with it. And now it feels like there's a hole in your wall. And every day, a giant torrent of garbage water comes through, and you wake up and you're like, well, time to deal with this.

Anne: You got to get the sun pump out. Yeah. I think it's the difference between feeling empowered by a technology and disempowered by a technology. I want to be as gentle with others about expectations for communications, as I would hope they would be with me.

Sarah: Yeah. I do feel like if we're able to find ways to relate to technology where we're focused on, wow, I get to connect with a human being in a genuine way, as opposed to, I'm drowning and I'll be drowning forever, and I'm not even really appreciating who I'm talking to or what we're talking about, because I'm just trying, I just need to get through this hoard of zombies today.

Anne: Yeah. Recreate the magic of the early internet. I think that means that you need to send more ecards.

Sarah: That’s true. Oh my God. And like, when was the last time I received an ecard? I only get e-cards from my dentist. 

Anne: That's because they all go into spam now.

Sarah: Well, of course.

*recording* 

File done. Goodbye. 

Sarah: And that was the story of email. Thank you so much for coming on this journey with us through the motherboard and into the future. You will. Thank you again to Anne Helen Peterson. Check out her work on the Culture Study Newsletter. 

Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick, our wonderful producer. While we're reminiscing about a time when email was fun, it's impossible to not think about my original AOL screen name, which was obviously Amoredragon88. And I would love to know yours. 

Over on our Patreon we have a new bonus episode featuring Josie Duffy Rice from our CSI episode recently. And in this one, we are talking about how to be a psychic detective in really just a few easy steps. If this is a career you've ever been curious about, it seems to be not that hard to crack into. Please don't do it. But if you want to hear about somebody else doing it, you can do it on at patreon.com/yourewrongabout. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you in two weeks.

*recording*

Now that I've gotten on the internet, I'd rather be on my computer than doing just about anything. 

It's really cool. 

The internet gave us a whole world of exciting new possibilities. So I guess this is a story of how it changed our lives. Maybe it will yours too. With the kids' guide to the internet.

We're riding on the internet cyberspace set free. Hell, virtual reality, interactive appetite, searching for a website, a window to the world, got to get online. Take the spin. Now you’/re in with the techno set. You’re going surfing on the internet.