Another Anna Eagin Adventure

The World’s Fair in 2050: The fat curator skips elegantly and calls the party of children out of the main hall and into a bright side-room.

“Step right this way and listen to it beep! Gather round, children, and watch as the screen fills up with messages. Some messages are vital, some are not, some are just bits and bytes rushing by … but here’s the trick. Here’s how it worked. Here’s how it generated anxiety. The receiver cannot immediately tell which is which – which is vital, which is a stray byte. So he has to set up trawling and detection routines. Now, a key twist: he always receives more emails than he can process in a day, and more than his cognitive systems can file and record. This is an immediate source of stress. He becomes dependent on other little electronic screens and even little scraps of paper just so as to remember what he has just read. This is done as he desperately seeks to augment his cognitive capacity. Remember the statistic, children: the early 21^st Century saw the production of post-it notes exceed the production of paper handkerchiefs for the first time in the whole of human history! More rot than snot, as the news media said at the time!”

“Secondly, another twist. The message recipient receives more emails than he can see on the screen. So he has to trawl up and down, moving the screen and trying to detect those that are likely to cause him most immediate pressure. Miss one, maybe because his eyes are tired, and bazooonga! Chaos reigns. The stakes are high. A new email is always on its way, so the task always grows. Any minute taken away from the screen, whether for productive reasons or not, is a handicap to his later ability to process the messages on his screen. So he has to juggle. What’s more, any failing, any slip, leads to more messages. More and angrier messages follow from a first missed one. The whole thing is a great, inflating anxiety machine. If the 2032 experiments had been successful and Pixar had been able convert anxiety into clean energy, then we never would have got rid of this technology.”

“As it is,” continues the curator, shiny buttons fastened on his blazer, “many of your grandparents lived for a very long time with this kind of technology. If you go home and visit them, maybe at home if they are still half-functioning, or in the Institutions for the Nervous Elderly, I am sure they will be able to tell you of how it was back then when so many ordinary folk lived on a diet of credit-card debt and electronic anxiety. They were hard times. Ask them about the Electronic Anxiety Machine or to give it its more precise title, the Electronic Anxiety Amplifier. Of course, many old folk will still know it by its still earlier title… Does anybody know what this was? What was this machine originally called?” the curator asks the assembled children.

“Email?” squeaks a modest little girl in the corner, her arm half raised.

“That’s right,” snorts the curator, approvingly. “It used to be called email.”

“It was first named email,” he continues, “because people likened it to another still earlier form of communication called mail. You may have seen this in historical movies. Cheery postboys and postgirls would bicycle around carrying physical incarnations of messages. Quite remarkable. Anyway, originally, these electronic messages were likened to those physical messages and so the whole thing was called email – shorthand for ‘electronic mail.’ A significant point of historical detail for the fastidious is that despite likening email to physical mail, paradoxically many organizations of the early 21^st Century thought themselves able to dispense with the protocols and etiquette that had kept the flow of physical mail in check. So email quickly morphed into something quite out of control. How odd was that, when you think about it now!”

“Anyway, children,” the curator continues, “as I am sure you all know, email was renamed the Electronic Anxiety Amplifier when it was noted that the common property shared by all participants in its systems is an increase in anxiety. This discovery was first made by the half-Polish, half-Italian researcher, Dr Piotr del Piero Baggio Maldini Nesta One-Nil-Will-Do. He was one of the first researchers to publish works through automatic EEG download. The story goes that Dr One-Nil-Will-Do was relaxing at home after reading some studies of workers in universities when the idea came to him. He quickly donned his EEG headgear, the patented Eureka! system, and presto his research insight was available all over the world. Unfortunately in those days the Eureka! system was beset by minor flaws and problems. That day the expletive filter was not working and unbeknown to poor Dr One-Nil-Will-Do, his research was first published under the title ‘The Great Email P*ss Off,’ which of course was what he was really thinking.”

The children start to giggle and laugh.

Anna Eagin woke from a dream – a scary dream. “I’ve been dreaming about the future,” she Twittered, “ and it scared me.”

“Anna,” her cousin Rachel replied, “You’ve only been in that job three days!”

“They don’t know what they are doing,” Anna DM’d back, “they haven’t got a clue.”

A short while later, Anna dressed and set out for work. Riding the Juicybike Sport that she bought from Eco Republic, she wove across the grey, sweeping outskirts of town. Checking first for the Alpro she had stuffed into her satchel, she reached down and flicked on the voice recorder on her iPhone.

“Dear diary,” she said as she settled into the traffic, “remember there are only three things wrong with this place called work….

“The first is that they don’t understand technology – but at least they know that.”

“The second,” she said “…is that they don’t understand organizations, no matter what they profess to be the case.”

“The third,” she says as she comes to a stop-light, “is that they don’t understand people.”

“And that, dear Diary, is a problem. A fundamental problem.”

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Coming soon: ‘The Cybernetics of Email.’

Free product placement to Alpro, Juicybike and Eco-Republic. Oh, and iPhone.

Images are Creative Commons by Ramona.Forcella – an artist – http://www.flickr.com/photos/ramona538/

Top image is iN :: AFTER EARTH Lower image is Dreaming Night in HPMD