Abstract
Email pervades every aspect of our daily lives. In her book, Email and Everyday: Stories of Disclosure, Trust, and Digital Labor, Esther Milne provides a comprehensive and critical exploration of the significant role that email plays in shaping people's digital media practices across diverse contexts.
Drawing on a mixed-method approach by incorporating online surveys and interviews, the book is structured into three sections: “Histories and Landscapes;” “Affect and Labor;” and “Archives and Publics.” Each section productively situates and examines email use in distinctive domains. The first section offers an overview of email's historical and technical foundations, highlighting the invention and development of email as shaped by cultural, industrial, and economic factors. The second section delves into email use in a workplace setting. Focusing on its affective aspect, the author coins the term “bureaucratic intensity” to describe how emotions influence email exchanges in professional contexts. Emails become personalized despite the expectation of maintaining a certain level of professionalism and rationality in the workplace. The section also articulates email governance, showing the often-invisible digital labor performed by moderators and administrators in managing email exchanges in discussion lists and groups. The third section examines the technical and social conditions that enable emails to be disclosed and made publicly accessible, highlighting the archival infrastructures of email communication. A salient feature of this section is a compelling discussion on the ethical implications of the public release of large-scale email datasets, using examples from the Enron corpus and Hillary Clinton's private email server. Additionally, this section explores the creative potential of email through artistic works that are produced on and through this medium, such as the “email novel” and “typewriter art.”
Email and Everyday: Stories of Disclosure, Trust, and Digital Labor advances our understanding of the implications of email on people's personal and professional lives. It is a timely and critical piece, underscoring the ubiquity of email in an increasingly mobile era. A standout aspect of the book is that it engages with the historical, commercial, and archival dimensions of email situated in both private and institutional spaces of everyday life, contributing to critical research in the field of mobile media and communication studies. By considering wider social, cultural, economic, and political forces shaping everyday mediated communication, it exposes the multifaceted ways in which email is produced, experienced, perceived, and even politicized.
Enriched with critical analysis and empirical evidences, this book has touched on key themes on email communication, including the practice of disclosure, building trust, and digital labor. This approach serves an important take-off point to unpack a nuanced understanding of people's everyday engagement with email. Indeed, the book offers critical insights into the possibilities and politics of email communication, making it a valuable resource for students and scholars seeking to understand the complexities of email and its role in mediating people's everyday digital lifeworlds.