No, I don’t want to talk to cyber automatons
As I look through my email inbox, I yearn for the net days of old. Nearly everything in it is an automated message — mailing lists, sales from various retailers, political action alerts, WheresGeorge bill found notifications, receipts for online purchases, even a notice that a Wii is (well, was) available for purchase at Toys R Us. And that’s not even including the spam, which is “stored” in a different folder, mainly thanks to my spam filter.
So, where’s all of the human email? I remember when I was first on the Internet, way back in 1995, when email was used almost exclusively as a replacement for personal correspondence via snail mail. When you got an email back then, it was meant for you, and most often it merited a response. Now my inbox is a barren wasteland of missives sent by heartless cyber automatons. I’m saddened that the majority of my online communications have moved away from email toward other methods.
I really do miss email. Email as a form of communication uniquely plays to my strengths. I love getting personal emails and thoughtfully composing responses. If you’ve ever chatted with me via instant message you’ll know I yearn for the loving confines of letters, because I refuse to yield to any of the IM conventions like abbreviating words and forsaking punctuation and capitalization. Anytime someone uses a number in place of a word my hand involuntarily twitches the mouse cursor towards the close window button and it takes conscious willpower to resist clicking the pain away.
So, please do send me an email. You’ll be making me happy, and what’s more, I promise I’ll respond. My email address is cydeweys[[AT]]gmail[[DOT]]com. What should the email be about? Anything! Just don’t tell me how to retrieve a lost Cambodian fortune (been there, done that), write to confirm my airline reservation.
And if you have GnuPG, please send the email encrypted as a big middle finger to this administration’s pervasive domestic espionage. My key’s fingerprint is 9C3DF6D23A28F6804ECA927ABC21184EFFA60567 and is available on MIT’s subkeys server.
April 19th, 2008 at 10:32
Funny, I was recently forwarded a message Brad Knowles(?) posted to dc-sage(?), that was arguing that email is going the way of Usenet. There’s far too much spam, and spam-fighters can’t keep up with spammers’ techniques. As a result, young folks today use IM or Twitter or whatever, and only use email to communicate with old farts like parents and employers.
I think that’s a fair point, though I don’t think that this means that the essence of email will disappear: IM didn’t kill email any more than telegrams killed snail-mail. Rather, the next generation will switch to some other technology(ies) that does the things that email does, but better. Or maybe SMTP will be replaced by something better.
Imagine if an increasing number of companies decide that setting up and maintaining their own email server is a losing proposition, and outsource that to GMail or Yahoo or whoever. Let’s say that Google introduces a new message submission protocol (and associated software) that provides security and fixes a lot of SMTP’s problems (call it SMTP:NG). Messages submitted this way get special treatment (e.g., faster delivery because there’s less checking for spam, or something). Yahoo starts supporting this as well, advertising that if you like Google’s client, you can continue using it when you switch to Yahoo. After some initial bumps (e.g., Yahoo develops its own competing protocol, and Google responds by implementing it as well), the industry settles on a new standard, with far less spam.
Oh, and everyone gets a pony.
April 19th, 2008 at 12:34
I’ll give you IM as a replacement to email. Yes, the medium lends itself to much smaller comments and more immediate conversation (the latter of which is often a benefit), but it has the same fundamentals as email: private conversation between two or more parties. There’s no one saying you can’t type out email-length comments in IM, and I’ve even done that on occasion.
But I don’t think Twitter is a valid replacement to email. Twitter isn’t a private communication between parties. It’s public communication, readable by anyone, and thus a lot more aptly described as microblogging than email-like. I haven’t used Twitter, so I don’t know if there are privacy settings limiting messages to viewing only by friends, but even that is more like a registration-required bulletin board than email, where you individually choose each recipient. And there’s no way to prevent Twitter from seeing the content of your messages. Email doesn’t have the same kind of centralized monolithic service provider that is required for messages to reach their destination.
Also, each Twitter message has a hard limit of 160 characters, which makes it very limiting on extended conversation in a way that IM or certainly email doesn’t. Many people using Twitter have already begun to exceed the limitations of the medium, sending multiple twitters out in an extended message when it would have long made sense to switch communication methods.
I see myself sticking with email, blogging, and IM for the foreseeable future. Twitter doesn’t really fill a particular niche for me. If I do want to get into microblogging, I think I’ll just run something on my own on this server.
I would love to see a better email system, because the current one didn’t account for the development of spam at all.
April 22nd, 2008 at 15:49
I sent you an email the other day and you haven’t replied as promised. :[
April 22nd, 2008 at 18:54
Patience! I’m busy as hell up here in Massachusetts, without unfiltered Internet access most of the day. But I have received it and I’m getting to it soon. Don’t frighten off anyone else from sending emails.
This brings to mind another neat aspect of email: time. IM demands immediacy, whereas emails can be responded to at convenience and leisure.