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E-Mail Addiction
August 16, 2007
An interesting AOL survey about e-mail addiction “reveals that more Americans are using portable devices to e-mail around the clock from virtually anywhere – in the bathroom, while driving and even in church; 83% of e-mail users [are] checking on vacation; many plan getaways around access.” This comes as no surprise, given that I’ve recently received business e-mails from colleagues at the beach, and earlier today a colleague was musing about the fact that one of her “getaway” hotels did have e-mail access, so she’d only have to be offline for one day this weekend. My e-mail addiction is based on fear: if I don’t check e-mail daily, when next I log on I usually have 2 or 3 hundred messages in my in-box, and nearly an hour of the next day will be shot if I have to slog through them all. Cause for concern? Maybe, given that the AOL report says “15% of Americans describe themselves as “addicted to e-mail,” and many are even planning their vacations with e-mail access in mind. About four in ten e-mail users say it is “very” or “somewhat” important to them to think about e-mail accessibility when they are planning a vacation, and eighty-three percent of e-mail users admit to checking their mail once a day while actually on vacation.” But here in the Boston area we don’t yet have to worry as much as those of you in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and New York: these top the list in AOL’s survey as the American cities "Most Addicted" to e-mail.
Meanwhile, the Times of London reports that Karen Renaud, a computer scientist at Glasgow University, and Judith Ramsay, a psychologist at Paisley University, recently completed a study of British workers that showed “there is evidence that e-mail can exert a powerful hold over its users and that many computer users experience stress as a result of e-mail-related pressure.” Their full report appears in the November 2007 issue of Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 23, Issue 6, pages 2791-2803. The paper “develops a three-fold typology of orientations to email: ‘relaxed’, ‘driven’ and ‘stressed’.” [from the abstract]
May your e-mailing be relaxed these balmy summer days, and I’ll post…
…more as it happens,
Cheryl
Posted by Cheryl LaGuardia on August 16, 2007 | Comments (0)
