Email (Object Lessons) - Softcover

Malamud, Randy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501341901 ISBN 13: 9781501341908

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019

Synopsis

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Do you feel your consciousness, your attention, and your intelligence (not to mention your eyesight) being sucked away, byte by byte, in a deadening tsunami of ill-composed blather, corporate groupthink, commercial come-ons, and other meaningless internet flotsam? Do your work life and your social life, hideously conjoined in your inbox, drag each other down in a surreal cycle of neverending reposts, appointments, and deadlines?

Sometime in the mid-1990s, we began, often with some trepidation, to enroll for a service that promised to connect us-electronically and efficiently-to our friends and lovers, our bosses and merchants. If it seemed at first like simply a change in scale (our mail would be faster, cheaper, more easily distributed to large groups), we now realize that email entails a more fundamental alteration in our communicative consciousness. Despite its fading relevance in the lives of the younger generation in the face of an ever-changing array of apps and media, email is probably here to stay, for better or worse.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

About this title

About the Author

Randy Malamud is Regents' Professor of English at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He is the author of ten books, including Reading Zoos (1998) and An Introduction to Animals and Visual Culture (2012). He has written for HuffPost, Salon, Film Quarterly, Chicago Sun-Times, and the Los Angeles Times and has appeared on CNN, BBC, and NPR.

Review

“In this slyly subversive little book, part rhapsody, part diatribe, Randy Malamud can't leave e-mail alone. His exuberant rants and riffs give us a new perspective on our infernal electronic inboxes. A fast, funny, compulsive read.” ―Mikita Brottman, Professor of Humanistic Studies, Maryland Institute College of Art, USA, and author of An Unexplained Death: The True Story of a Body at the Belvedere (2018) and The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men's Prison (2016)

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1501341901
• ISBN 13: 9781501341908
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 184