The Age of Annoyance: Managing Our Frustrations with Information Overload

By Gavin Jocius

Like it or not, we live in the age of annoyance. Technology, electronic communications, gadgets, airline travel - as it all gets easier, it also seems to get exponentially more annoying. Annoyance is described as an unpleasant mental state that can lead to emotions such as frustration and anger. Sound familiar? When was the last time you yelled at your "stupid computer" or got frustrated that your smartphone could not find a signal?

"The Age of Annoyance" is designed to help people make sense of the crazy world we now live in and better understand why we seem to lose control so easily when dealing with technology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 2, 2011
• ISBN: 9781105102011

Book preview

 The Age of Annoyance:

Managing Our Frustrations with Information Overload

Gavin Jocius

Copyright © by Gavin Jocius.  All rights reserved.

ISBN for eBook version 978-1-105-10201-1

www.annoyance.us

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Contents

Prologue

Introduction

E-mail vs. email?

Email is not dead

Operation spam Grandma

Viral Agents

Too many tweets might make a twat

Angry mob mentality, drive-by anonymity, and Soothsayer Schmidt

Flamebait and the rhetorical hammer of Godwin’s Law

Information overload and the role of bloggers

Maintaining the appearance of control

We're all lazy until the machine stops

The Spazz

The age of annoyance – interruptions

The age of annoyance – speed and convenience

The age of annoyance – minor injustices

The age of annoyance – the new norm

Digital detox

OOO in the age of annoyance

Bibliography

Bio

Cover Illustration Copyright © 2011 by Immanuel Kester

Cover & website design by Immanuel Kester

First Edition

Copyright © by Gavin Jocius.  All rights reserved.

ISBN for eBook version 978-1-105-10201-1

Subject to the exception immediately following, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without prior permission from the author.

Printed in the United States

Disclaimer: The email marketing messages described in this book pertain to permission-based marketing only.  Any direct replies and feedback included were collected from different sources – friends and colleagues in the industry – that adhere to email marketing best practices.  Although the author has made every effort to ensure that the information in this book is correct, the author and publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause.  Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals and organizations.  The views expressed within this book are that of the author and do not reflect those of the companies the author has worked for or been affiliated with – past, present or future.  Finally, this book is not a how-to guide or manual for electronic marketing; it is simply a collection of observations made by a person who works on the Internet; therefore, the opinions expressed in this book should simply be viewed as such.

For Lyra, whose entry into this world was my only deadline for getting this book finished.  Without her, this would have simply been another of her Dad’s unfinished projects, housed on one of the countless external hard drives scattered around the house.

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Prologue (the Pope’s email address)

Oh how the times have changed.  In his 1999 book Permission Marketing, Seth Godin writes: a Catholic bishop based in New York was even quoted as saying ‘If Jesus were walking the earth today, I’m convinced He would have an e-mail address (1999, 21).  When Godin’s book was written, the above statement must have seemed rather charming.  Today, we know that Jesus, if he were walking the earth, would have multiple email addresses.  Like President Obama, he would have one closely guarded address that he would only share with aides and trusted advisors.  He would also have a general mailbox that an army of dedicated volunteers would manage.  Like the Dalai Lama, who in 2011 had over two million followers, Jesus would also have a verified Twitter® account.  He would also have an official Facebook® fan page, a dedicated YouTube™ Channel, Flickr™ and Foursquare accounts, an extremely high Klout score, and perhaps even a good old fashioned website where the About Page would include the site’s communication credo: Brothers, if you have a message of encouragement for the people, please speak (Acts 13:15).

When I was working for an Email Service Provider (ESP) in Manhattan, the Vatican sent us, along with all other major ESPs, an email (or I guess it was more of a decree).  The message included the newly appointed Pope Benedict XVI’s email addresses (one in English and one in Italian) and instructions that we were to whitelist the Pope’s addresses.  Meaning, we were to make sure that both addresses were not included on any lists within our database – opt-in or otherwise.  It was the Vatican’s preemptive global unsubscribe campaign to make sure that the new Pope would not be bothered with an abundance of email.  Annoying the Pope during his first week on the job seemed to be as deep a sin as one could commit in the digital realm.  Needless to say, we obeyed the decree.

For me, receiving an email from the Vatican years ago symbolized the fact that everyone is communicating online and that Jesus and the Pope probably need email more than the rest of us because they have more followers than we do.  They need to communicate, and email is a great way to do that – particularly to very large groups of people.  

Today, we all have our own followers, but not all of our voices online are enlightened, informed or benevolent.  We do not always send tweets of compassion or insight.  We aren’t regularly retweeting: My dear brothers, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry via @James1:19 #GoodAdvice. In fact, it is quite the opposite.  We do not always think before we tweet; we have flame wars constantly online, and we inscribe our own personalized decrees to the world with ALL CAPS and angry emoticons.  Why do we act this way?  

As enriching as the Internet has become for many of us, it has also filled us with profound rage at times.  While many of us are perfectly kind people in real life, there is just something about the Internet that makes us act a certain way.  So if you have ever found yourself wanting to shout at your computer, perhaps send the Pope an angry email or tell someone on a discussion forum to screw off, then I encourage you to read on.   

Introduction (is f*#& you! an unsubscribe request?)

The ‘liberating’ effects of the Internet separate individuals from the common values and ethical norms they adhere to in the real world.  - Elias Aboujaoude

Each morning, I start my day off by rolling out of bed and checking my iPhone™ on the way to the fridge/coffee pot.  Before I do anything, I have to check my inbox where I am typically greeted by Groupon™ and LivingSocial® whose deals are then rushed off to the junk folder along with Facebook updates and the occasional notification of a new Twitter follower.  This routine is very familiar to most people nowadays because our inboxes, John Freeman writes, have usurped the morning paper as a shaping context; many of us check it before we even glance at the news, let alone brew that first cup of coffee, making our email (and by extension ourselves) the most important information – for the shaping context –  of the day (174).

Our inboxes provide us with that all important mental framework for what we can expect the rest of the day.  It is our personalized link to the world that awaits us outside, and for whatever reason, something in the back of our minds keeps telling us that checking our emails should be the number one priority in the morning – more important even than nutrition.

I find that checking work email first thing in the morning is like playing Russian Roulette.  As far as shaping the context of your day is concerned, you are essentially taking part in a dangerous game of chance.  You hope you can just log-in, delete a few messages, respond to one or two, let people know you are up and moving, and proceed to having breakfast with a clear conscious –  knowing that nothing major will happen in the next hour or so it takes to get ready and commute to work.  But every once in a while: BAM!!!  You scroll down to see an urgently marked message from your boss who is delivering news that could potentially ruin your morning.  If we know that there is a good chance of bad news appearing in our inboxes, why do we bother?  We could just learn to avoid our inboxes and enjoy a few moments of morning bliss, leaving the pain and misery for the office. 

Unfortunately, most of us have no choice but to check our emails.  We are constantly bombarded with such messages, resulting in a frustrating marsh that we have no choice other than to tackle (Paasonen, 165).  We talk about getting rid of our emails, Sherry Turkle writes, as though these notes are so much excess baggage (11).   Whether we like it or not, we relentlessly have to take out the electronic trash.  In an independent market research survey, Microsoft® reports that 96% of survey respondents said that their email load either increased or stayed the same over the last year and that 37% said they spend half of their day reading or replying to email (Parr, 1).  In a report published in 2009 by the University of California, San Diego, the average American consumes 34 gigabytes of content and up to 100,000 words cross our eyes in a single 24-hour period (Bilton).  Most of us know that bad news potentially awaits us somewhere in those 100,000 words, and we are willing to take that risk in an effort to keep our inboxes from turning into unmanageable trash heaps.  But the heap keeps growing.  Unsubscribe.com reported that in 2010, 27 billion marketing emails were deployed, which amounts to roughly four emails per day for every person on the planet … that is 7,300 emails annually for every person with an active email address (Wasserman, 1).  With email marketing firms like ConstantContact® offering FREE 60-day trials and doing national ad campaigns, every company in the United States with a contact list (that has been properly obtained) has incentive to deploy email campaigns.

I would first like to mention that email marketers, at least all the ones I have dealt with, are not spammers nor are they Nigerian money launderers.  They do not own porn servers in the Netherlands and most have not made millions of dollars pedaling penis enlargements.  Email marketers do not send spam; they send Bacn.  Bacn is the email you want, just not right now.  While spam is unsolicited, the majority of all Internet users opt-in to receive some sort of Bacn.  It is the monthly eNewsletters you receive from your alma mater or the deals you get from the travel website you used to book your last flight.  Bacn is the stuff