Starting out from Franz Kafka’s novel, The Castle, we meander through an exploration of the impact of that seminal socio-digital artefact—e-mail—on the academic lifeworld. In the process, we illustrate not only how e-mail is ‘experienced’, facilitates instantaneity, deludes us with speed, shapes the working day and accelerates work processing but also the ultimately illusory promise of the ‘wired’ world to empower us to escape organizational boundaries. Paradoxically, the Castle is always one step behind but it never comes second.
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