Email and the Everyday: Stories of Disclosure, Trust, and Digital Labor

Email and the Everyday

Stories of Disclosure, Trust, and Digital Labor

Esther Milne

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2021 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Milne, Esther, author.

Title: Email and the everyday : stories of disclosure, trust, and digital labor / Esther Milne.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020016674 | ISBN 9780262045636 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Electronic mail messages. | Electronic mail systems. | Language and the Internet.

Classification: LCC HE7551 .M55 2021 | DDC 384.3/4--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016674

d_r0

Experiencing the everyday can sometimes be a gift. I realized this fact when my mother died. She had offered a rock-solid foundation of normalcy, comfort, and the deep security of familiarity. Like many wonderful aspects of life, I didn’t quite grasp the significance until it was gone. I dedicate this book to my parents, Ruth and Rex Boschen, with love and beautiful memories.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I Histories and Landscapes

1 The Origins of Email and Its Development

2 Inventing Email and Doing Media History

3 The Email Industry

II Affect and Labor

4 Bureaucratic Intensity and Email in the Workplace

5 Moderation and Governance in Email Discussion Forums

III Archives and Publics

6 The Enron Database and Hillary Clinton’s Emails

7 The Art of Email

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1 Email using the DEC VT52 computer terminal, circa 1978.

Figure 7.1Cat Series by Joan G. Stark. Reproduced with permission from the artist, © 1996.

Acknowledgments

This book would not exist without the contributions of my research participants. Thank you for your funny, sad, worrying, and intimate stories of email. I hope in these pages you find little sparks of recognition and enjoyment. Many thanks to Kaz Horsley for her meticulous editorial work. For his patience and assistance with the survey design and analysis, my thanks to Scott Ewing; you are so very much missed. Mentoring is a word often bandied about, but I need to thank Karen Farquharson, Larissa Hjorth, and Alison Young for just this sort of support over the years. I thank the anonymous reviewers whose advice and astute suggestions helped me navigate the path to publication. And, finally, thanks to the Special Interest Group for Computers, Information and Society (SIGCIS) for their knowledge and generous sharing of vital details. In particular, my warm thanks to Thomas Haigh for his insightful reading of chapter drafts.

This book was in production when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, and so its relation to email has not been considered.

Introduction

In April 2014 a story began circulating across social networking sites announcing the ban of email. Apparently France had called a halt to the use of employee email communication after 6 o’clock at night.¹ The move was the result of a labor agreement struck between employers’ federations and workers’ unions in the engineering and IT sectors (including the French arms of Google and Facebook and some high-powered consultancy firms). It stipulated that staffers in these companies had the right to disconnect from electronic communication devices to ensure their working time did not exceed the legislatively mandated 35-hour week. Reactions to this news item were instructive. UK-based media chastised the French for their quaint ideas. As one columnist from The Independent elaborated:

Heaven only knows what the average British working week would be if digital hours were taken into consideration. No matter what time of the day or night, whatever we may be doing in our leisure hours, we are only a ping away from being back at a virtual desk. I rarely have dinner with anyone these days who isn’t attached to their smartphone, waiting for a pause in the conversation so they can check their emails.²

Similarly, a Guardian columnist joked, While we’re staring down the barrel of another late one … across the Channel they’re sipping Sancerre.³ US news reactions echoed this incredulity with a New York Magazine writer sighing, Well, at least we American workhorses can still end a bad date with the ol ‘Oh, sorry, my boss is emailing me like crazy!’ exit strategy.⁴ Although these articles ostensibly argue for achieving sustainable work-life balances, they somehow reinforce the imperative to respond always to the ceaseless demands of the market. With no such gesture toward labor reform, USA Today called the move draconian,⁵ and a Fox Business policy analyst found the agreement absurd.⁶

When the French right to disconnect law was enacted in January 2017 it attracted a fresh round of interest about the always on digital workplace. Again, while there was widespread approval about new ways to achieve a reasonable balance of work and leisure hours, running beneath some of the reports was a slight distrust for those who would question their workplace labor entitlements. The disadvantage of such legislation, which was part of a suite of new French labor laws, was an increase in the bureaucratization of everyday life. A Time reporter who called it the dark side of the reforms warned how reams of laws and regulations governing termination clauses and annual leave have proliferated over the years, adding wistfully that the United States can only dream of such entitlements.⁷

This news event introduces some central questions I address in Email and the Everyday: How is email experienced, understood, and materially structured as a practice that traverses the domestic and institutional spaces of everyday life? What kinds of stories are told—both about email and through email? How can we understand email itself as a significant industrial sector? What are the consequences for the public release of large-scale email datasets?

Before explaining my approach to these questions, I want to explore briefly how email has been understood in both popular and scholarly contexts. Invented during the 1970s and coming to widespread adoption by the late 1990s, email has been lauded and condemned. In what follows I outline some of the major trends in communication research about email and also point to the gaps: the intriguing omissions that prompted the writing of this book.

The Death of Email

As is often the case with narrative, our story begins with its own death.⁸ Underpinning the French news reports was the conviction that it was time for organizations to kill-off email.⁹ One Wired reporter made a similar pronouncement—email’s about to die!—and quoted Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz to back him up.¹⁰ Yet the demise of email has been predicted for at least two decades with various reasons advanced for the threat. In 1989 John McCarthy speculated that the fax machine would bring about the end of email communication, then in its first decade of widespread use.¹¹ From the mid-1990s, it was spam—the sending of unwanted commercial email¹²—that emerged to herald its undoing. Writing in 1999, Patrick Flanagan warned that the extraordinarily enhanced connections and excitement of interacting with others through email were jeopardized by the introduction of spam.¹³

From late 1999, an interrelated narrative thread developed around the idea of information overload, and in these warnings volume was hampering organizational productivity. While in some instances spam was again cited as the reason people couldn’t manage their inboxes, and was therefore indicative of the demise of email,¹⁴ research also looked for other reasons why traffic might be on the rise. Online education, for example, increased email to unmanageable levels for educators.¹⁵ Discussing the last days of email, another commentator linked overload to flattened organizational hierarchy: anyone can send one to any number of people on any subject at any time of the day, a situation which means we are at (if not past) the saturation point with e-mail.¹⁶ In 2011, this narrative reached a crescendo when Thierry Breton, the chairman and CEO of the business technology consultancy Atos, announced the abolition of internal email by 2014.¹⁷ As part of an overall wellness at work strategy Atos had embarked upon, this new initiative, called Zero email™, would address the challenges organizations face as a result of the continuing explosion in data. Instead of email, Atos implemented new collaborative tools for internal communication because email is on the way out as the best way to run a company and do business.¹⁸

Finally, during the mid-2000s, the death-of-email narrative became one of media obsolescence. A consumer affairs advocacy publication claimed in 2006 that instant marketing, through blogs, social networking sites, and mobile text meant email is losing its luster.¹⁹ Likewise, a Slate article of 2007 argued that e-mail is looking obsolete as Facebook, Twitter, and texting become the dominant mode of communication for the teen market.²⁰ In 2008, the business publication Wikinomics announced more news on the death of email, writing that over 95 percent of emails received could have been dealt with more effectively by other media including face to face, video or instant messaging.²¹ And in a 2010 blog post the social media business platform Socialcast unsurprisingly declared, Social networks spur the demise of email in the workplace. Even in a field not known for its restraint, the hyperbole of this article is remarkable and worth quoting in some detail:

Email may be dead, but it’s not going to disappear. Email is like a zombie or a vampire—it’s going to hover and haunt us when we least expect it. … A communication shift is happening as users look to blow the top off information silos and let knowledge flow freely without the constraints, frustrations and loss in productivity email brings. … Now, instead of pockets of knowledge, employees will have one central nervous system that unifies every piece of an organization’s information. … This new-found freedom of better information flow will be the nail in the coffin for email. … We’ll begin to thrive as we witness and experience the renaissance of social enterprise communication, moving closer each day to email becoming a burden of the past.²²

This author’s compelling images can be placed within the critical theories of residual media²³ or media archaeology.²⁴ These approaches do not represent a unified field although they do offer productive ways to negotiate or map the uneasy dynamic that exists between the technological past, present, and future. Such perspectives illustrate that the narratives of media redundancy and revolution are never neutral but, instead, are always advancing patterns of economic and institutional relations; what Charles Acland calls a magically transformative capitalism, lifted from the constraints of the material whose power depends upon masking of the hand of labor.²⁵

The views of Tim Young, the author of the Socialcast post quoted above about the autonomous, dematerialized force of information, are shared by many other IT business consultants. Ryan Holmes, for example, the CEO of HootSuite, a social media management system says: Email is the new pony express—and it’s time to put it down. … Email is where good ideas go to die. Brilliant messages race across the Internet at light speed only to end up trapped in an inbox.²⁶ For these commentators email has a sort of regrettable materiality. It traps, pressing us down, burdening us with a past we long to escape.

I am not interested here in proving or disproving such claims about email by pointing out that the materiality of social media may also exert such constraints, but thinking through a residual media of the present allows me to explain what this book is not. It is not an elegiac rescue mission for email. Like many other institutional drones, I struggle with it too. But that is precisely the point and what gives email its piquancy, its urgency as a media form to study. The moment when communication platforms, applications, or cultures give rise to an excess of affect is when research opportunities are incredibly rich. How email can be simultaneously, banal, overlooked, indispensable, and reviled is one of the central questions I seek to explore in this book.

Prominent Trends in Email Research

Despite these dire predictions, as a global mode of business and personal communication email still outstrips newer technologies of online interaction. The Radicati Group, a market research company, reports that in 2020 over half of the world’s population uses email and more than 306 billion emails are exchanged every day. During the next four years, email growth is predicted to continue at a rate of 3 percent to reach more than 4.4 billion email users worldwide by the end of 2024. Moreover, email remains the predominant way to sign up for internet-based services including social networking sites, online shopping, government interfaces, telecommunication providers, and news and entertainment portals.²⁷ Reporting on the most popular online mobile activities worldwide in 2017, Statista finds that despite the increasing growth of mobile messenger apps, e-mail has remained the leading online communication channel.²⁸ Email ranks as the no. 1 online activity for mobile phone users ahead of watching video content or accessing social media sites.²⁹

My point here is not to argue for the dominance of email over other forms of communication or to make predictions for its future. But it is striking, despite figures that clearly indicate the continuing popularity and everyday reliance upon email, how email seems routinely to be ignored across contemporary landscapes of media study. In the fields of communications, media history, cultural studies, material culture, media archaeology, and digital ethnography, the story of email—its role as a form of technological, institutional, and cultural practice embedded in everyday life—remains to be told. Email history as a key point in the invention of the internet has been explored in detail (as I elaborate below) but in general these investigations use email as a stepping stone to the central platform, application, or device with which they are more concerned. Indeed, the term email has become something of a shorthand, used merely to stand in for the wider category of digital communication or, going back a few years, new media. In a given media account we might read a statement that says conventions have developed about the appropriate language to use in email compared to a Facebook status update. Yet turn to the index and email is nowhere to be found.

Across the wider research sector many studies of email exist. Spanning three decades, the existing scholarly literature on email communication is, as one would expect, vast. Searches across major academic databases return thousands of hits for email. As a salient reminder of its ubiquity, in many of these citations the only occurrence of the search term—that is, the reason it has returned a result—is the inclusion of an email address of the author or details about how to contact the journal editors by email. To provide a snapshot of current and historical trends in email research, the major critical themes are mapped below. Instructive, too, are the journals in which the highest proportion of email-focused studies appears. Leading the field in this regard is the journal Communications of the ACM. Published in 1990, one of its first papers to consider email communication, titled Networks, Email and Fax, examines the syntax of the email address and the utility of error messages, warning again that email would soon be replaced by the fax machine.³⁰

Flaming and Affect

Of the early investigations on email, one of the most widely cited is Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler’s 1986 paper Reducing Social Context Cues: Electronic Mail in Organizational Communication.³¹ Here, the authors examine how email flattens institutional hierarchies because messages from superiors and managers looked no different from messages from subordinates and non managers. Lacking social context cues of position or status, organizational email produces uninhibited behavior that includes profanity, negative affect and typographical energy (called flaming) and the use of email for personal communication purposes. Since the publication of Sproull and Kiesler’s paper, the cues filtered out perspective, together with the terminology surrounding the phenomenon of flaming, has been critiqued.³² A chief objection is the imprecision of the term: hostility, over-exuberance, swearing, loss of inhibitions, superlatives, exultation, racism, and misogyny have all been included as defining features of flaming.³³ Although interest in flaming peaked during the 1990s the debates have been reconfigured around contemporary practices of trolling.³⁴ Early communications research on affect was often investigated through social presence theory or media richness, which examine the degree to which a given application produces the presence of one’s interlocutor. Like the flaming research, approaches were critiqued for overlooking contextual factors and for presuming certain qualities were intrinsic to the technology.³⁵ Medium choice continues to inform research trajectories about email and affect, with studies developing instruments to assess the motivations or fears governing media selection—often with the aim of making predictions about the psychological contexts and profiles of users.³⁶

Such perspectives raise the issue of technological determinism, the specter of which can be glimpsed hovering in the background of the chapters to follow. In order to redress what seems a gap in media and communications research it is necessary to exert a sustained focus on email, its formal properties, the look of its software, and the stories of its use. But email examined in isolation risks abstraction well beyond any recognizable or lived experience of the everyday. So my approach attempts to move between finely grained analyses of email stories and consideration of wider social or political currents.

Linguistics, Education, and Letter Writing

With conceptual links to flaming, email has been a prominent topic of research within the disciplines of linguistics and education. Early research attempted to determine how the apparent immediacy and colloquial vocabulary of email resembled speech while also capturing some of the qualities of writing, specifically, its asynchronous basis and its geographical and technological separation of users.³⁷ Of related sustained scholarly concern have been the challenges of email for education in the contexts of English as a Second Language.³⁸ The field of linguistics and language has produced a number of monograph-length studies including Carmen Frehner, Email—SMS—MMS: The Linguistic Creativity of Asynchronous Discourse in the New Media Age; Naomi S. Baron, Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It’s Heading; and David Crystal Internet Linguistics: A Student Guide.³⁹

Email is also conceived as a genre of literature through the field of epistolary communication, letter fiction, and the history of the post office. These studies include contrasts between email and letter writing in works such as Brenda Danet, Cyberpl@y: Communicating Online; Sunka Simon, Mail-Orders: The Fiction of Letters in Postmodern Culture; and Emma Rooksby, E-Mail and Ethics: Style and Ethical Relations in Computer-Mediated Communication.⁴⁰ Danet’s research represents a prolonged scholarly interest in the registers of online discursive modes, together with the traditional media forms of greeting cards, postcards, and letters.

Writers and artists continue to see the narrative potential of email. Hey Harry Hey Matilda (2017), by the photographer Rachel Hulin, is a fictive story about twins told entirely in emails. Interestingly, the book has been billed as the world’s first Instagram novel because early versions of its text and image were posted to Instagram in the run-up to Hulin securing a publisher. For many of these projects, it is email’s mundane nature that recommends it for aesthetic purpose. Because email seems almost universal and unremarkable it offers a surprisingly powerful narrative technique. This storytelling quality holds, as I later discuss, whether we are referring to the formal properties of the email novel or the everyday worlds that unfold on email discussion lists and parenting groups.

Organizational Email and Workplace Surveillance

As mentioned, the interrelated disciplines of organizational behavior and management studies were some of the first to consider the function of institutional email, with a high proportion of the early research focusing on digital literacies.⁴¹ Email monitoring and privacy also represents a persistent critical thread running through the literature. A 1992 article published in Public Relations Quarterly notes that the increasing prevalence of email into the workplace has been matched by a significant increase in legal action brought against employers for their intrusive monitoring of staff communications.⁴² Similarly, a report on human resource planning in 1999 argues there is an urgent need for policy formation about personal email use in business contexts to protect commercial reputation and minimize legal exposure. It reports on a survey conducted by Elron Software, manufacturers of workplace monitoring programs, which found that 85 per cent of adults send or receive personal emails through company systems, 70 percent have sent or received adult oriented emails, and 64 percent have sent or received racist or sexist email content.⁴³ Given the company’s interest in producing evidence of product demand, results that demonstrate high percentages of potentially legally compromising email usage are not surprising. Caveats aside, many studies show that in varying degrees, workplace monitoring is a ubiquitous, institutionalized practice.⁴⁴ Regular justifications for an employer’s need to monitor its email systems are commercial confidentiality, IP protection, minimizing harassment, and maintaining workplace productivity by restricting personal emailing.⁴⁵

Alongside management studies that endorse (or at least do not overtly criticize) workplace monitoring⁴⁶ is a body of literature concerned with the protection of employee privacy rights. A 1996 examination about the introduction of the US Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 details its inability to protect adequately the privacy of workplace emails through several unsuccessful court actions brought by employees.⁴⁷ Arguing more forcefully, Thomas Hodson and his colleagues state that, although it is legally sanctioned, workplace surveillance is both unethical and economically unviable.⁴⁸

Such studies provide a critical backdrop for thinking through aspects of everyday workplace email. In particular, I discuss how my research shows that disclosure and trust emerge as areas of significant interest. More broadly, and cutting across both the personal and professional contexts for email use, the unexpected publication of or unauthorized access to someone’s messages is an enduring cultural trope about email. While we might be familiar with the leaks and hacks of sensational newspaper headlines, in actual fact the micro disclosures of everyday email life need also to be considered.

Email Marketing and Business Etiquette Manuals

Email marketing manuals make up the largest proportion of books published about email.⁴⁹ Also popular are email guides and etiquette manuals; two representative titles are David Shipley’s SEND: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better, and Jim McCullen’s Control Your Day: A New Approach to Email and Time Management Using Microsoft® Outlook and the Concepts of Getting Things Done®.⁵⁰ As well as the self-help business literature there exists a wealth of peer-reviewed material studying the commercial possibilities of email from across consumer behavior, direct mail advertising, electronic shopping, and viral campaign tools.⁵¹

Individual studies like these piqued my interest about the existence of an email industry. It is easy to plot the success of one particular email marketing approach or to drill down on what analytics tell us about the most popular email clients or software. Who leads the market between Gmail and Microsoft, for example? But what’s missing is a big-picture sense of the broad email-provider industry: a loosely connected media landscape comprising data-analytics agencies, email software vendors and developers, internet service providers, and email marketing companies. Although important work has provided a systematic account of the commercial reach of the internet—most notably the 2008 edited collection by William Aspray and Paul E. Ceruzzi, The Internet and American Business—what’s missing is a helicopter view of all the interlocking parts of what we can call the email industry.

The History of the Internet

Email as a key point in the invention of the internet has been thoroughly detailed.⁵² The standard history begins in the United States in the mid-1960s with the development of packet-switching technology within a number of industry, university, and government institutions including (in the United States) the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), RAND Corporation, the research consultancy Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. (BBN), and (in the United Kingdom) the National Physical Laboratory (NPL). From these various technical, business, and social initiatives the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network—ARPANET, the precursor to the internet—was built in 1969 and began to connect computers at major US and UK university sites.

During the intervening decades, there have been significant attempts to enrich this narrative by looking at lesser known nodes of internet history to include under-researched platforms, applications, and cultural stories across global networks.⁵³ A special issue of the journal Media International Australia includes the use of microcomputers in the 1980s,⁵⁴ the rise of political blogs,⁵⁵ and the uptake and gendered daily experience of the internet in homes during the 1990s.⁵⁶ Finally, The Routledge Companion to Global Internet Histories demonstrates the strength of perspectives that investigate internet development outside of the dominant Anglophone approach.⁵⁷ Two important monograph works represent productive historical approaches: The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture, edited by Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson, and Finn Brunton’s, Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet.⁵⁸ These provide valuable corrective versions of internet history that dismiss spam as an aberration, completely distinct from the authentic story of online culture. Instead, Parikka and Sampson reveal how the anomalous objects of technology are central to its sociotechnical development, and Brunton provides a detailed historiography of the emergence of a specific media form.

Media, Communications, and Cultural Studies Research

In contrast with the studies outlined above, email seems underrepresented in media, communications, and cultural studies. Searches across prominent journals return disproportionately low results for the word email in titles, keywords, or abstracts.⁵⁹ In some of the results, email did not return in any of those categories. But when I began to sift through the hundreds of mentions of email in full text searches I found many papers were, in fact, substantially concerned with email, the term mentioned 50 times, for example, and featuring extended discussion. To me this is tantamount to being overlooked. I want to ask these journals: Here is a media form comprehensively covered in your media journal article but you haven’t thought it worth recording it in the title, keywords, or even the abstract?

In addition, email is often used as method of research rather than the object of study. Although articles about such use weren’t included in the general tally, the extent to which email underpins research across many disciplines, including interview, diary, or dataset, is another of its hidden stories—and it raises questions of ethics I will later discuss. As a final point of contrast, note that in New Media and Society, email appears in the titles of six articles, but there are 76 returns for Facebook when searching by title.

Crucial email research does exist in the field of media, communications, and cultural studies; I cite many of these works, or draw from them, in this book. So my point is not to admonish my fellow media scholars. But this absence is intriguing. What makes the omission even more compelling is the central focus that the everyday plays in cultural theory. It would appear that the ubiquity of email is so total as to have rendered it all but invisible even to those who relish the study of the everyday. In focusing on the mundane and quotidian nature of email, Email and the Everyday: Stories of Disclosure, Trust, and Digital Labor brings this study into the foreground. Having contextualized the field, in the following sections I set out methods and outline the chapters.

Research Design and Critical Approach

Everyone has an email story. During informal conversations with colleagues in the preparatory stages of this book, I was struck by the number of embarrassing, hilarious, and regrettable email instances recounted to me. There’s the inevitable reply all disaster, when an insulting comment made about a coworker intended for a single recipient mistakenly gets sent to the entire office; and the fits of pique or clandestine affection expressed late at night, causing cold sweats in the author the following morning. I’ve heard the strategies people deploy to cope with ever-increasing volumes of email, and stories from those who refuse to reply to email outside of work hours—not to mention the nonverbal responses I received: the rolling of eyes and shaking of heads from people who think they’re at the mercy of this media form.

My book is an attempt to capture and make sense of such sociotechnical, affective practices in a critically systematic, materially situated, and evocative manner. For this reason, I apply both qualitative and quantitative methods. My research for the book draws on two major online surveys conducted with people in the United States (N = 1,031) and in Australia (N = 1,025), as well as interviews with industry experts, email group moderators, artists and creative practitioners, and people for whom email has raised privacy and ethical issues, such as those affected by the Enron dataset release, itself a highly researched email corpus. The US survey ran in 2017 with people aged 18+ who had used email in the last six months and the Australian survey was run in 2015 also with people aged 18+ who had used email in the last six months. Minimum quotas were applied in both surveys across age, gender, and region in order to achieve a balanced sample. Both the US and Australian surveys used a combination of open-ended questions, predetermined yes or no options, and Likert-scale responses to statements. Participants were also invited to contact me to discuss further their personal opinions and experiences. Utilizing a quantitative and qualitative or mixed method survey design allowed me to collect different kinds of data.⁶⁰ So I posed closed questions to gauge the popularity or prevalence of certain email practices and platforms (most-used email clients or frequency of email checking, for example) and open-ended questions to seek narrative-based reflections about email usage. On this latter point, the questions were designed to elicit stories about people’s everyday use of email. I encouraged people to tell me about their experiences of intimacy or emotion through using email: surprising moments perhaps, instances of regret, embarrassment, surprise or pleasure. But I was also aiming to gather insights and descriptions on the routine nature of email, and so I asked questions about the regular uses to which email is put, such as sending documents, arranging meetings, or contacting retailers and service providers. Using this approach, I was able to map both the extraordinary and banal stories of email from ordinary users themselves. In general, the interviews took place via email although in some cases I conducted the discussions face to face.⁶¹ The methods also involved close analysis and detailed summaries of technical reports, white papers, news articles, court papers, and standards literature. Further information about these sources and the various informants are provided during the chapters.

The Everyday

As someone who has struggled fairly unsuccessfully to apply high theorists of the everyday such as Mikhail Bakhtin or Henri Lefebvre, my approach leans toward the grounded, situated, or empirical perspectives of this critical terrain to trace the contours of lived experience read through the routines and vicissitudes of email. That is not to reject the necessity for theoretically informed understandings of what it means to study the everydayness of culture. It is, after all, feminist theory that has taught us to regard with a keen critical eye the gendered spaces of the everyday, and to insist on the ways in which these must be theoretically and empirically negotiated, via, for example, Donna Harraway’s work on situated knowledges.⁶² But it is to recognize that approaching the everyday analytically presents a number of challenges. For one thing, the everyday often seems resolutely to resist definition: obvious but elusive, as Fran Martin puts it.⁶³ The everyday when applied as a descriptive term is ambivalent because it attempts to capture that which we embrace, or at least accept, as pointing to the experiences, feelings, and practices that constitute the major part of our lives. But it may also register a criticism, that which is unexceptional and without merit. As Ben Highmore explains:

On the one hand it points (without judging) to those most repeated actions, those most travelled journeys, those most inhabited spaces that make up, literally, the day to day. … But with this quantifiable meaning creeps another, never far behind: the everyday as value and quality—everydayness. Here the most travelled journey can become the dead weight of boredom, the most inhabited space a prison, the most repeated action an oppressive routine.⁶⁴

When the everyday is seen through a prism of value and the banal is easily dismissed it becomes fertile analytical territory. As Joe Moran notes, in cultural studies, the banal is usually turned into something else, made interesting and significant by acts of subaltern resistance or semiotic reinvention.⁶⁵ Moran’s comment hints at a further paradox of the everyday as it is studied. If we look closely at the ordinary uses of media, we do (by necessity) often remove these objects from their original contexts. By focusing intently on a media object, we risk blunting its everyday nature. As Judy Attfield so astutely notes, to enclose ‘the everyday’ in inverted commas changes its meaning … by plucking it out from the commonplace of the given.⁶⁶

A central challenge thus issued by considering the everyday as an object of critical study is how much to include. Fastidious levels of detail can actually end up fetishizing the practice or media form you seek to analyze and hence undercut its defining quality: that of going unnoticed. Stare at something long enough and it consumes all of your vision. But not registering enough detail tends toward abstraction and, again, loses the spark of recognition that makes the ordinary such a compelling site for analysis. In thinking through how to represent the everyday, scholars have turned to the