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[By Zhou Tao/Shanghai Daily]

A half-century before the invention of e-mail, T. S. Eliot asked, "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

If he were alive today, contemplating an electronic inbox on a flickering computer, he might well have added, "Where is the information that has been lost in trivia?"

It is one of the paradoxes of our times that inventions meant to make our lives easier inevitably end up slowing us down.

When e-mail first entered my life, I was thrilled; instead of letters piling up for months as I struggled to find the time to pen replies, faxes not going through, and telegrams that cost an arm and a leg, I now had a cost-free means of communicating instantaneously and efficiently. I became an avid and diligent e-mailer.

And how I regret it.

I get over 300 e-mails a day, sometimes twice that. Some are urgent (but not necessarily important) work-related questions. Some are from friends; because I am an Indian MP, many are from job-seekers, favor-demanders, and petitioners. Some are one-line queries; others are lengthy documents requiring perusal and comment.

Many are unsolicited junk mail, offering products and services that I never asked for and do not need; and though an efficient filter catches many of them, it also catches some "real" mail.

Some are mass mailings, both interesting and diverting.

An astonishingly large number are jokes - both verbal and visual - of varying quality. Many are campaigns. And increasingly, some are viruses.

Because they are on the screen, I feel obliged to go through them all, if only to make sure that I do not need to read them. And this is a chore that takes more and more of my time.

From convenience to burden

When e-mail first came into vogue, one could spend 15-20 minutes a day on it; now it consumes two to three hours. And, because one's other work does not stop, those are hours added to one's workday, and therefore subtracted from one's personal life. A convenience has become a burden.

When I am at my computer, I find myself neglecting more important matters that have arrived by "snail mail." E-mails automatically become urgent, because I know that if I do not reply to one immediately, it will soon be swamped by 200 others.

I find myself scrambling to attend to utterly trivial e-mails only to get past them to the (possibly) important ones that lie behind.

The result is "information fatigue" - a palpable sense of exhaustion, coupled with persistent anxiety about coping with the sheer volume of material to be digested, compounded by an ever-shortening attention span in the face of the ceaseless barrage of data. Like Eliot, I felt that I understood more when I knew less, and knew more when I had less information to process.

This is a global problem - an estimated 294 billion e-mails were sent daily in 2010, and the figure continues to increase. As technology advances, it has become more and more difficult to escape it.

No longer is e-mail confined to a desktop computer at the office; the advent of smart phones has allowed people to check their e-mail wherever they are.

It is almost enough to have one longing again for the day when information was a scarce resource and one had to go out to find it.

Now so much information is so readily available that the challenge is to sift the wheat from the chaff.

To paraphrase Kipling, it is clear that the e-mail of the species is deadlier than the mail.

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