|
|
Email Addiction Part 1: Looking For Love In All The Wrong Places Email Addiction Part 1: Looking For Love In All The Wrong Places<by John Botscharow Let's start off this series on email addiction by looking at the "literature". By that I mean, looking at what others are saying. One of the best paces to start research on a lot of subjects is About.com, especially on things related to the Internet. The About email area has one article that offers a general introduction to email addiction: Email Addiction (Emailoholism) With the article is a poll where 9 out of 10 responded that they knew someone who was addicted to email. So, it appears that the problem is pretty widespread. The author, Heinz Tschabitscher, says email addiction, like alcoholism, is a result of the human need for social interaction and a release for our "repressions" in the Freudian sense. That would explain some of the bizarre email addresses people feel compelled to use to hide their true identity as well as explain the negative things people do with email, like sending viruses or trojans. These people don't need to be sent to prison, they need to go to a mental institution! Heinz says: What makes people drink here and now? We live in a society that forces us to control our emotions in an extreme manner. The use (abuse?) of alcohol allows us to act emotionally and blame the circumstances (i.e. the fact that we were drunk) afterwards to justify our non-conforming behavior (we probably need that). I nearly fell into the trap of social drinking which leads to alcoholism about 20 years ago. I used to be the buyer for a wholesaler of LPs and 45s for small music stores. I was always getting all kinds of freebies from the record companies. Things like albums, concert tickets, and invitations to promotional events. It was the parties that led me down the primrose path. Lots of free food and lots of free booze. Someone was always encouraging you to have another drink. I remember one party where I lost count after 24. I got pulled back to reality by my wife at the time. She gave me an ultimatum: quit drinking or leave. Fortunately I was not a complete addict yet, so, with some very hard work and some serious support from friends, I was able to give up drinking. But it was nip and tuck there for awhile. My email addiction took a similar path. When I was newbie in Internet marketing. everybody who I considered my teachers told me to do lots of email marketing. So I did that and ended up an addict. It was an ultimatum from my wife Liz and my daughter Heidi that made me take a good look at myself. I was spending more than 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and almost 365 days a year at my computer. Half of that time I was doing email, the rest learning new ways to do email. Now that I no longer do email, I only spend about four to six hours a day on my business and I am way more productive now then I was then. The most important example of this is that I now have time to focus on my writing. I now have more time for my family. That means I have time to home school my three kids this coming school year. I have been home schooling two of them for over a year and this fall I will start home schooling Ian, my 9 year old autistic son. As many of you know, it was the need to be available for and to spend more time with Ian that led me to Internet marketing. But my addiction to email marketing was actually taking me away from him. That realization was the major motivation for giving up email and the rock on which I built my recovery. In case you do not yet understand what drives me, it is my children. They are my rock and my salvation, along, of course, with my wife. In her article of March 14, 2001, Email Addiction and the B2B Email Marketer Debbie Weil, ClickZ B2B E-Mail Marketing Expert, says: Every study shows email to be the Internet application most often used. Checking it is the first thing employees do in the morning when they turn on their computers, and according to eMarketer, it's the preferred method of communication for business. According to a 1999 study, 51 percent of employees preferred email, 35 percent preferred the phone, and a mere 5 percent wanted to communicate by snail mail. Surely the email percentage has risen since then. Yes, I know that email is the most used business tool currently online. But I take exception at the use of the word preferred. Preferred means making a volitional decision to use email over some other option. But how much volition is there if your employers makes you use it as part of your job description? How volitional is it if the people you do business with insist on using it? How volitional is it if there is, as was the situation until recently, no viable alternative? Under those circumstances, it is no wonder the Internet is full of email addicts. What do you think the result would be if all the water coolers in all the businesses in the world were full of whisky or vodka and there was nothing else available to drink? Don't you think these businesses would be staffed by alcoholics in a very short time? Debbie got quite a response to that article as she explains in her follow-up Finding a Cure for Email Addiction a week later: Readers in Australia, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. -- from brand-name e-marketing companies to solo practitioners -- seemed relieved to say, "Yes, I'm addicted to email!" Another quote from her article is relevant here: Jared Spool, Web usability expert and principal of User Interface Engineering, offers a useful perspective: "Email addiction is an old problem," he said. "People crave social interaction. It's like standing around the water cooler all day... Unfortunately, with email it looks like you're sitting at your computer working." This statement reinforces the idea that people become addicted to email due to an unfulfilled need for social interaction. That says much about the society we have created, doesn't it? Using Jared's water cooler analogy, let me ask you something. Would they all be standing there if they knew the water was polluted or poisoned or 100% pure grain alcohol? If they are water cooler addicts, you bet they would. Just like a serious alcoholic will drink anything that gives him a buzz even if it is dangerous to their health,, so will email addicts continue to use email no matter the dangers involved. The email waters are poisoned and polluted but people keep drinking it because they are addicts! In conclusion, it appears that people use and abuse email out of unfulfilled need for social contact. Spammers and the senders of viruses are not doing their thing to be malicious. They are looking for love! To read the rest of this series, please subscribe to our newsletter © 2004 3R Marketing All Rights Reserved John Botscharow is the hopefully farsighted editor and publisher of the R Market Daily and the owner of 3R Marketing. He is a Certified Guerrilla Marketing Master, a "blogger" and has been a thorn in the side of the Establishment for almost forty years. John has been an online publisher for more than four years and has dedicated himself and his company to teaching other dedicated professional publishers of small quality ezines how to take advantage of the available technology to make their ezines even more effective. Visit either the R Market Daily or 3R Marketing to learn more. NOTE TO PUBLISHERS: Thank you
Make Money Online and Live Life to the Fullest Many people today feel they are trudging to work every day to a dead end job. These people often feel like hamsters in a wheel, running the same paces over and over and never really going anywhere. So many people have hopes and aspirations outside of their cubicles, but they seldom have the chance to explore these avenues because work and family commitments clash to severely leave any extra tim. . .
More Internet Marketing Links
|
|
