Drowning?
Over the last 10 years or so the argument has raged back and forth, ever since the Internet guru Lawrence Lessig famously declared e-mail bankruptcy in 2003 after being “inundated with far too many messages to manage”.
We all know the story. Many of us spend hours every day and week fighting off a deluge of e-correspondence. And there is no respite! You take your eye off the inbox for any time at all and when you get back to it there will be a pile of new mail waiting for you. We get so much email that we rarely read more than the title of unsolicited messages. It’s certainly a good way of keeping busy but is it a good way of getting things done?
I fondly remember my first email message sent over a phone line via modem, in 1994, I think. I sent it to myself, like Mr Bean and his birthday card. And I was so pleased when it popped up in my inbox.
But times have changed and many of us are drowning in email every day.
There must be a better way! Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and the like provide good alternatives for friendly messages. But for professional purposes it’s hard to find viable alternatives.
So the total number of emails sent just goes up and up.
Email is not dead. But it IS changing.
That’s the message from the site https://www.emailisnotdead.com/.
One of the problems with email is that it is used so much for marketing. Unsolicited messages, commonly known as spam, are the curse of email users. Some kinds of aggressive marketing are illegal, falling foul of EU privacy laws. Email addresses are considered personal data, subject to protection. That is the theory anyway. But we all know how ineffective these laws are.
And meanwhile you might have a legitimate (non-commercial) reason for sending unsolicited mail. For example, you might wish to send an invitation (not an invitation to buy, you understand). Let me give you an example. This is a story that really happened to me.
Just the other day I wanted to send an invitation to some schools in Osona. I asked other departments in the university for a list of contact addresses but was informed in each case that bulk sharing of email addresses is illegal. So I looked at the government web page of the Departament d’Ensenyament. They helpfully provide various lists of schools in Catalonia, including telephone numbers and street addresses. But none of these lists have email contact addresses. An explanatory note at the top tells you why:
De manera general, no es proporciona el correu electrònic dels centres educatius per evitar que les bústies electròniques se saturin.
[In general, we don’t provide school email addresses in order to stop their inboxes filling up.]
In this case it would not be illegal for the Department to make known the addresses, because they have the authority to do so. But even so they consider it inadvisable.
So what is a poor user to do? In this case, I downloaded the list of schools, found the ones I was interested in and typed their names into a search engine. In each case I was able to find the corresponding email address in a matter of seconds. After all, most schools put their contact address in a very prominent position on their web page.
What’s going on? Are we being encouraged to use email or not? I’m confused. I think I’ll go and have a cup of tea.
It’s a few days later now and my email invitations have all been sent. I’m still waiting for replies.
Email is dead. Long live email!
