I chaired a panel at Supernova yesterday, entitled "Spam and the Future of Email" and really got a lot of the greybeards assembled shaking their heads.
My thesis, in case you missed the sidechat, is that email blows:
Email sucks, and all the nice things about it (universal addressability, universal standards, etc.) add up to the reasons that it has become unusable. It sucks.
I think that IM is a better model -- so much better that email will have to adopt the definining characteristics of IM to survive:
- Gated community -- IM are networks, and th emembers must log in to enter. Once in, the members must follow certain protocols of interaction (either directly or indirectly enforced) or they are booted out. This could prohibit sales intrusion, sex advances, etc., depending on the network's arrangement.
- Communication with the Known -- while IM networks may allow strangers to contact us, we can opt to shut them off. In essence, we can limit communication to those that are known to us.
- Conversation, not Communique -- email is not conversational, really, unless you believe that sending letters through surface mail is conversational. Conversation is generally better than dueling essays, which is the communication style that email engenders.
Well. We will see, but email -- because of the fundamental flaws in the system --is falling down. What made it useful in an earlier world is dooming it in this one.
We should just switch to IM-based communication, and treat email like fax or surface mail.
Despite the generation evidence -- danah boyd pointed out in a session on connected work that young people prefer other media to email -- and the spam invasion, people are so comfortable with their email inbox that they can't really contemplate moving onto a different footing.
I pointed out that earlier 'indispensible' communication media, like the telegraph, fax, jungle drums, smoke signals, and surface mail, have been relegated to the trash heap.
Oh well. I guess I hadn't expected people to ask where they could sign up to join my "just say no to email" movement, but I didn't expect that the Supernova crowd would be boiling the tar and plcking the chickens getting ready to tar and feather me.
I maintain that one of the key aspects of the future of email is that it will decrease in use relative to other media, especially instant messaging based technologies and blog/RSS collaboration tools.
Some of my panelists maintain that email is fine, and just needs to be fixed up a little -- clean out the spam -- and then everything can go back to normal. Personally, I think email is not particulary good for the things we try to use it to do, despite the fact that we are used to it, and it is universal.
After the panel, various folks tried to reason with me. "Don't you understand," several of them said, "everything connects through email, and its so easy to use." Yeah, yeah. Fine.
Personally I am interested in the issues surrounding communicating with those known to me, or known in the context of some social group. And for those situations, email blows. I refuse to agree that we should settle for a lowest-common denominator approach for what is most important, really, which is collaborating with my closest contacts.
1. Julian Bond on June 25, 2004 01:15 PM writes...
And then there's the email mailing list...
Two thoughts.
Permalink to Comment1) An awful lot that is wrong with email is actually what's wrong with the dominant email client.
2) One-Few-Many. If you categorise technologies according to whether there are one, few or many authors and one, few or many readers, you'll see that we spend a lot of time comparing apples with oranges. one-to-one IM is hopeless for few-to-few group discussions but email mailing lists work well for this. one-to-many RSS is hopeless for one-to-one communication and won't replace email. One-to-few blogs won't replace one-to-many newspapers. and so on.
2. Carol on June 25, 2004 04:41 PM writes...
I have used social software/collaboration software to form close communities to communicate with people I know well, as an alternative to email and web sites. I have found that the founders of communities struggle to get their members to integrate the community application into their regular routine. The community founders find that they have to send email to the members to "remind" them to check in, or tell them there is new content via a broadcast email, or even broadcast the content to their email so they just click on a link to see new content. So while community founders and select participants love the sense of community and real time collaboration around files, photos, and comments, they struggle to get others to commit that same level of participation. Email still relieves that pain.
Permalink to Comment3. Debbie on June 28, 2004 01:16 PM writes...
The inefficiencies of email is certainly becoming more apparent. Other than communicating directly with your intended audience, email has also become a file repository for storing data and information. I think online communities are the way to go as you have a number of different tool sets to collaborate and file knowledge. It's private and you don't need to create multiple identities to ward off spam and unwanted information. I'm not advocating the death of email, but rather capitalizing on other technology to relive ourselves from email related stress. Wow, to think that email is inducing stress.
Permalink to Comment4. Arnold Kling on July 2, 2004 03:44 PM writes...
You could always set up a "buddy list" in email, in the sense of using a whitelist filter. But people don't do that, because every time you make a contact and say, "please send me an email and I'll get back to you with a proposal" you'd have to remember to update your buddy list.
My daughters use IM much more than email. But they don't have to sort out high-priority from low-priority communication. Once you move into the world of work, it seems to me that one of the characteristics of IM--every communication seeks an immediate response--won't work terribly well.
My $.02
Permalink to Comment5. Stowe Boyd on July 2, 2004 04:32 PM writes...
I think that Arnold's concept (regarding his daughters who 'don't have to sort out high- from low-priority communication') is driven by a view that all IM is pushed to the foreground, and that you *must* respond immediately.
Certainly, some (maybe much or most) IM works that way, but if you are a power IM user in an organization that has moved to IM you will find an interesting range of IM use. Some IMs you reposnd to immediately, and others are sort of back burner requests or conversations that you rejoin during the day when it becomes appropriate.
More importantly, many IM solutions allow offline queueing of messages, which means I can opt to post a non-instant message to you. You can choose the time to open that, and when you do we can start up a synchronous discussion on the topic. Or maybe you will opt to reply when I am offline, too -- which is a lot like email, except its all inside the walled-garden of IM.
I suggest that you try IM. Invest the time into it. Get your "world of the known" to shift over -- a few colleagues that you currently exchange email with every day (or every hour). Until you actually experience what its like, you just won't know.
When people your daughter's age hit the ranks of business, they will have established all sorts of strategies like these to balance various levels of priorities of communication.
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