The Age of Ignoring People

I’m generally pretty easy going, but there is one thing that never fails to piss me off: when people ignore other people’s emails.

We are living in a new digital age where advances in communication have allowed us to ignore each other with more frequency and more electronically-remote coldness than was ever possible in the warmer analog age of phone calls and mix tapes. Yesterday’s “Why didn’t you return my phone call?” was a more serious social indictment than today’s “Why didn’t you return my email?” Ignoring someone’s phone call is an almost hostile act, whereas ignoring someone’s email is almost expected; it’s a sign of how busy and important we are.

As phone calls are now discouraged whenever possible, email has become the primary means by which strangers interact with each other. It therefore has a disproportionate effect on our impressions of the civility of the outside world. And by setting the standards of etiquette with respect to this form of communication so incredibly low, we are damaging the interpersonal glue of our society. Just as the anonymity of the automobile can facilitate road rage – as we regard each other not as individuals with faces and emotions, but as impersonal steel road machines – so too can the impersonal nature of email have a similar dehumanizing effect.

This phenomenon is especially true in the world of job-hunting, where applicants are corralled into the voiceless electronic domain without any choice in the matter; how many times have you seen this heart-warming admonition on a job posting: “No Phone Calls Please.” So, with a telephone call out of the question, job-hunters must rely on email as their primary means of communicating with prospective employers. And of course, prospective employers often invoke their “I’m just too busy to respond to email” prerogative, and the result is that millions of job-hunters are ignored and made to feel invisible.

As our society becomes more atomized and fearful of the unpredictable forces of globalization, terrorism, and disease, it’s helpful to remember that there are, in fact, millions of good and decent people working to make this world a better place. It’s easy to forget this fact, however, when we have a shared social norm that encourages us to ignore each other in the most frequently used modality of human interaction.

You might argue that this is hopelessly impractical. How could we ever hope to respond to every email that we receive? But surely, we’ve downgraded our expectations of ourselves if this is really our argument in defense of ignoring millions; as a society, we eradicated polio and put men on the moon. Why not set ourselves a goal that every job-seeker deserves the dignity of at least a short, electronic response when they have bothered to seek employment with us? Even more so if they’ve actually come into our building for an interview. If your HR department doesn’t have the time to write back to people, then hire an unpaid intern for this exclusive purpose. The intern will profit from the experience, and the faceless applicants will feel better about your company and the general disposition of strangers.

No doubt, there are some who are truly inundated with an avalanche of emails on a daily basis, for whom trying to respond to each and every message is an impossible task. But if your workplace is anything like mine, you could dramatically reduce the amount of electronic chatter by simply walking over to someone’s desk and engaging in a five minute conversation, rather than an extensive thread of back-and-forth emails of confusion and clarification.

We are not yet at the stage where we would simply walk away from someone at a party upon being asked a question that was inconveniently time-consuming or boring. So, why do we allow for the virtual equivalent? If we want to change the world, why not start with something simple, and stop ignoring each other.

#DontIgnoreThatEmail #Whatever