Email

Object Lessons

by Randy Malamud, Christopher Schaberg (Series Editor), Ian Bogost (Series Editor)

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Do you feel your consciousness, your attention, and your intelligence (not to mention your eyesight) being sucked away, byte by byte, in a deadening tsunami of ill-composed blather, corporate groupthink, commercial come-ons, and other meaningless internet flotsam? Do your work life and your social life, hideously conjoined in your inbox, drag each other down in a surreal cycle of neverending reposts, appointments, and deadlines?

Sometime in the mid-1990s, we began, often with some trepidation, to enroll for a service that promised to connect us-electronically and efficiently-to our friends and lovers, our bosses and merchants. If it seemed at first like simply a change in scale (our mail would be faster, cheaper, more easily distributed to large groups), we now realize that email entails a more fundamental alteration in our communicative consciousness. Despite its fading relevance in the lives of the younger generation in the face of an ever-changing array of apps and media, email is probably here to stay, for better or worse.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology

184 pages, Paperback

Published September 19, 2019

About the author

Randy Malamud is an American literary scholar, cultural critic, and Regents' Professor Emeritus of English at Georgia State University. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University and specializes in modern literature, ecocriticism, cultural studies, and human-animal relations. His scholarship explores the intersections of literature, ethics, visual culture, travel, and environmental thought. Malamud is the author of numerous influential books, including Reading Zoos, Poetic Animals and Animal Souls, An Introduction to Animals and Visual Culture, The Importance of Elsewhere, Email, Strange Bright Blooms, and CRASH! Aviation Disasters and the Cultural Debris Fields. Earlier in his career, he also published several studies on T.S. Eliot and modernist literature. In addition to his books, he has edited scholarly collections and written extensively for newspapers, magazines, and academic publications. His work has appeared in outlets such as The Atlantic, Salon, The New York Times, and Chronicle of Higher Education. Through his wide-ranging writing, Malamud examines how culture shapes human relationships with animals, nature, travel, and technology.

Reviews

[Pamela · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a short book in the ongoing Object Lessons series. Each book is focused on one topic and the books vary on how the author approaches the subject.

For this book on email the author stayed very close to the subject and made it quite entertaining as well. There was so much humor in this book, it was a delight to read this.

One of the best chapters was called Junk. Yes, it is about that unwanted spam, but written well. That chapter alone was worth the read, and quite short. It’s one of the shorter ones, not quite two pages long.

The author shows bias towards this necessary form of communication, but not entirely likely it. There are many examples of why there is a dislike, such as how easily overwhelming it can be by the immediacy of contacting anyone at any time. He also contrasts to what is no longer done, the writing of physical letters and what was lost in that.

And yet, it seems the goal of the book was to make the reader look at email in a new light. And it did that for me, so I’d say this was a success.

Book rating: 4.5 stars

[T. Augenblick · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fun little exploration of many facets of an interface we often take for granted. Sometimes Malamud uncovers intriguing metaphors, historical connections, or anecdotes. At other times, he's just free associating, quoting dictionaries and Wikipedia, or making not-so-brilliant puns. I'm not sorry I read it, but I'm not sorry that it isn't any longer.

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a short and surprisingly entertaining treatise on email -- its history, its functions and its foibles.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Julian Assange, John McCain and Umberto Eco shared a disdain for email. Would Henry David Thoreau have found a place in their club? Over 150 years ago, he observed that “we are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine to Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” If that sums up your feelings on the topic, check out Email by Randy Malamud to trace the history of modern communication from the telegraph to Kathy Acker’s erotic email correspondence I’m Very Into You, Adaobi Nwaubani’s novel of Nigerian email scams I Do Not Come to You By Chance and a mailbag of equally diverting epistolary stops in between.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilarious and witty insights from an English professor on this modern and ubiquitous form of communication.

[Claire · Rating 2 out of 5]

My dude really doesn't like email 🙃