FYI: I am useless
If you've watched PBS at all over the last 15 years, you probably know who Ken Burns is. His PBS series, The Civil War, was a high watermark in rolling some kind of humanity into the telling of history. Let's face it, you can read about Pickett's Charge or Shiloh, but these events happened so long ago, pre-dating even the Sony Walkman, that it's hard to work ourselves into an emotional lather over any of this.
Ken Burns came close, though. Specifically, the letters from soldiers to their wives back home are literature in themselves. Let's face it, if I could write even a page like that to a prospective girlfriend, she'd be breaking down my door moments after receiving it.
What's most amazing is how much effort went into these letters. Wartime and love are a far cry from business and the need to keep co-workers updated, but there is something we can take from this. As Stever Robbins pointed out in a Harvard Business School article last year, the real sweat in communications has shifted from the sender to the recipient. Whereas before it took real effort to compose complete thoughts, write them and post them (in the sense of using the U.S. Postal Service), I can now open an email message, shrug, type 'FYI' and shoot it off to Chelsea and Brian for them to deal with. Let them open the attachments or scroll down the chain of forwarded emails. The ideas are all in there somewhere. Hop to it.
Not only does this make 'You Have Mail' more alarming than exciting, but the economy of email really gets us out of coming up with any kind of original summary. We're in the business of shifting thoughts around instead of grappling with them. 'FYI', in particular, is symbolic of the least possible value I can add to anything. By slapping FYI on a message and forwarding it, I'm admitting to the world: "Here. I can't add anything." Or, "I don't feel like making the effort to add anything." Or, "I'm forwarding it because my inbox is full to bursting and I need you to store this, whatever it is."
For a real world analogy, think about your neighbor carting over 12 boxes filled with 20 years of Car and Driver magazine because you asked whether their BMW had been a reliable car. FYI.
I don't think I'll ever be as eloquent as any of those soldiers who wrote home from the battlefield. But, seeing how they poured their hearts into hand-scratched letters under fire, I guess maybe I could write three sentences explaining the gist of the 32 trailing emails before hitting ye olde Forward button.
Still, I won't be sitting by the phone waiting for Ken to call.
Ken Burns came close, though. Specifically, the letters from soldiers to their wives back home are literature in themselves. Let's face it, if I could write even a page like that to a prospective girlfriend, she'd be breaking down my door moments after receiving it.
What's most amazing is how much effort went into these letters. Wartime and love are a far cry from business and the need to keep co-workers updated, but there is something we can take from this. As Stever Robbins pointed out in a Harvard Business School article last year, the real sweat in communications has shifted from the sender to the recipient. Whereas before it took real effort to compose complete thoughts, write them and post them (in the sense of using the U.S. Postal Service), I can now open an email message, shrug, type 'FYI' and shoot it off to Chelsea and Brian for them to deal with. Let them open the attachments or scroll down the chain of forwarded emails. The ideas are all in there somewhere. Hop to it.
Not only does this make 'You Have Mail' more alarming than exciting, but the economy of email really gets us out of coming up with any kind of original summary. We're in the business of shifting thoughts around instead of grappling with them. 'FYI', in particular, is symbolic of the least possible value I can add to anything. By slapping FYI on a message and forwarding it, I'm admitting to the world: "Here. I can't add anything." Or, "I don't feel like making the effort to add anything." Or, "I'm forwarding it because my inbox is full to bursting and I need you to store this, whatever it is."
For a real world analogy, think about your neighbor carting over 12 boxes filled with 20 years of Car and Driver magazine because you asked whether their BMW had been a reliable car. FYI.
I don't think I'll ever be as eloquent as any of those soldiers who wrote home from the battlefield. But, seeing how they poured their hearts into hand-scratched letters under fire, I guess maybe I could write three sentences explaining the gist of the 32 trailing emails before hitting ye olde Forward button.
Still, I won't be sitting by the phone waiting for Ken to call.
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