Click it Good!

Damn that “reply all” button. It has a way of turning every clickster into an amateur comedian and floods my inbox with groan-worthy puns and a raft of highly personal RSVPs that constitute TMI to the max. I think it is that everyone is so starved for attention and validation that they can’t help their itchy trigger finger when they see a long recipient list and the opportunity to memorialize their wit in the bowels of the Google servers until the second coming. Maybe they think that if there’s a William Morris agent hidden somewhere on one of these lists, a well-timed “your mom” joke will mean sweet release from their cubicle and the guy who smells like bad gouda sitting in the next cell over.

You should know at this point that I can already hear you fuss-budgets clicking your tongues and saying exasperatedly, “Why don’t you just delete them you lazy so-and-so?” My reasons are multi-fold. For one, I like to keep an archive of all my correspondence. If there’s ever a mass-tort litigation over the scheduling of a lunch meeting to discuss the schedule of meetings for the next three months, I want to have all of my ducks in a row. Besides, if I’m ticking off a list of e-mails to delete, I might accidentally get rid of the one with Giada’s Passion Fruit Mousse recipe and there’s nowhere else that I would possibly be able to find that again. Thirdly, why should I take more time and energy sifting through someone else’s e-diarrhea when that person couldn’t be bothered to distinguish between the button with one little arrow and the button with two little arrows?

This e-mail phenomenon has taught us that people cannot be made to shed their animal instincts just because they’ve started to walk upright. This is the major flaw in Darwin’s theory. If a hundred monkeys locked in a room can produce Shakespeare, why can’t people at least bother to spell out “lol” (which I doubt they’re really doing anyway) when they decide to broaden the radius of people disturbed by their self-absorbed attention grabbing beyond those within earshot? We could all take a lesson from the monkeys to form a nice heuristic for when it’s appropriate to use this powerful feature. If your message is not ten syllables with beats at 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10, keep it to yourself.

Notwithstanding a penchant for hyperbole, the reply-all abusers are not the drum majors in the parade of horribles that we’ve been discussing. They’re more like the baton twirlers…mildly irritating, totally useless participants in a larger spectacle that is a black mark on our civilization. Put differently, it’s the social engineering version of the law of large numbers. How many pointless megabytes of social desperation will it take to clog our information technology infrastructure? Send out an unflattering picture of Hillary with a shotgun and a 40 to a bunch of people and wait ten minutes. If you can resist the urge to take out a hammer and smash your own computer just to stop the dinging, you’ve got an iron will or a defective eardrum. The rest of us are going to have to re-learn how to make fire.