Tim Cornwell: Dickens of job to beat virtual junk

E-MAILS are a waste of time. Sensible people, I suppose, realised this some years ago. It is the “cc” button, in particular, that ought to be banned.

A prime example of time-wasting communication arrived in my inbox at 14:49 yesterday. The sender is listed as “marketing”, and the subject line is the Friends of Borde Hill Garden.

It’s a harmless sort of mailing, nothing to do with penile enlargements or girls named Rita from Poland, advising that Borde Hill Garden is opening early this year, so visitors “can enjoy masses of spring bulbs, the magnificent magnolia displays and the numerous camellias”. Borde Hill, however, a fact not immediately advertised in this message, is a charming spot south of London, close by the M23, not exactly an instant outing from Edinburgh.

At some point in the past year, my own office e-mail hit some exponential point with the indiscriminate lists supplied by public relations firms for arts writers or probably journalists of any kind, or in fact anyone, anywhere in the UK.

Merely noting, junking or deleting them is a menace. I have nothing against the Göteborg International Film Festival, never having been to it, but did I have to be told at 14.11 that Jonas Holmberg is to take over international programming from Andreas Degerhammar?

Professional publicists are only one culprit – actually, it’s us. E-mails are now deluging us, not so much with junk but with semi-junk, the messages that are multi-multi-copied, from businesses, grumpy neighbours, colleagues, cc-ing supposedly personal, important or relevant messages by the sackful.

We’re all guilty. A plumbing leak that caused a minor family crisis this week, as plumbing does, also generated a slew of round-robin e-mails bouncing between the tenants of a shared building that were by turns panicked, outraged, insulting, and ultimately deeply pointless. The only person that thankfully refused to be drawn in was the plumber.

Unlike the obvious spam, you have to chuck this junk out yourself. It’s an effort not to send it. Cheap and instant world-wide communication is a wonder, but how do you choose to communicate, and with whom? Maybe e-mails are being outdated by Twitter. But the lengthening list of technological keepy-uppy leaves you wondering if quite soon the multi-zillion dollar company Facebook will be as passe as Yahoo is.

One older friend predicts e-mail and its offshoots will finally hypnotise the planet, so that a lot of machines are just permanently talking a lot of blather to each other. Reading Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, we agreed, was much more productive on the bus than fiddling with the mobile phone like worry beads.