Email as social media

It is apparent to everyone that social media is distinctly a different experience today from how it initially developed. It has become a form of mindless consumption instead of a social space where one interacts with other genuine individuals. The concept of content, once merely used on Madison avenue, has become so ingrained in the social media environment that those who would otherwise call themselves entertainers, artists, or journalists have now come to regard their field as mere content creation, as producing things merely meant to get you hooked so that you will look at more advertisements. This has been accelerated due to LLM’s ability to quickly create things that are “good enough” to look at, read, or otherwise consume. Consumption has become the only reason to interact with social media. But alternatives are not only necessary, they are already here.

Social media’s fall from grace did not occur with ChatGPT, but it has accelerated since then. Social media platforms do not make money off of our enjoyment, but merely from our attention. This was perhaps best displayed by the stratospheric rise of tiktok, and of the subsequent explosion in short-form video platforms that followed. These built on an ecosystem that had continuously been trying to capture more and more of our waking hours. Actions to resist this were slowly being taken, even if subconsciously. The decline of independent forums, where discussion is instead taken to deep-web¹ spaces like slack, discord, group chats and direct messages, is perhaps the clearest sign of this. This was well underway before generative AI arrived, but as Maggie Appleton has pointed out, “the dark forest” of spam and slop has expanded — and will continue to expand — rapidly.

I have written about the benefits of email before, but I then focused on how email could benefit the user individually, and how spam has forced people to move to other mediums. Here, I instead want to describe how one can not just return to the email-workflow of yore, but reimagine it as a new form of social media that allows one to curate and decide on what to interact with, but also how to format that interaction and to contribute to the meaning and interpretation with the work.

Writing emails is a laborious task, at least compared to scrolling an infinite feed. But it is this labour that is put in to email that is the differentiating factor. Microblogging platforms like twitter, mastodon, and bluesky can never become places for genuine presence because of its ease of use. Writing a toot on mastodon is little different from writing as short prompt for an AI. What LLMs have taught us is that one must put in the work to create something meaningful in the eyes of others, because what is valuable is the time you spent in formulating those ideas.

Social interaction is by necessity a creative process. One does not merely communicate raw information in the form of statistics or binary data, but we instead choose to frame and disseminate information in a unique way. This creative process is what makes us interesting as individuals, to interact with, and valuable to others as agents in the world.

Email also facilitates an inner discussion. While other mediums require little of the author to critically examine their statements, writing emails allows oneself the time to read, reread, and edit one’s position. This means that in an email conversation between just two people, each person takes control of the conversation completely in a way that instant messaging and the like does not do. The author is free to have an entire discussion in their head, picturing responses in their mind. This then moves the conversation forward in a double dialectical fashion, with each person’s internal debate framing their responses that are in turn responded to.

When I write emails, it is not uncommon for the word count to reach into 2-3000 words. This is longer than many blog posts I write, and while it commonly covers multiple topics — all organically developed — it allows for a form of creative expression that other mediums do not posses. It allows me to write in a much more free manner, to an audience whose intellectual strengths (and weaknesses) I am much more aware of, and yet still cut those parts that would otherwise be necessary to paint a full picture of the issue. It allows me genuine connection with people I know in a way that reading their newest tweet doesn’t.

Because of email’s asynchronous nature, it allows us to write and respond whenever we personally have time. Some people argue that email fails to accomodate groups of users greater than 2, but I disagree. Things like mailing lists allow large groups of people to communicate in public with lots of other individuals, with anyone quickly jumping in when required. Conversations chains are easily listed and followed, compared to the fleeting reply chains of large slack or discord groups. We can take our time to respond, and those wo are interested in what we have to say can quickly get up to speed in the conversation, much like the easily digestible feeds of social media. The difference is that instead of quickly scrolling by to read short messages by lots of different people, you are forced to sit and listen to one person’s reasoning for much longer — not all that different from how you would in real life.

James O’Sullivan, of University College Cork, writes in noema magazine:

Social media’s current logic is designed to reduce friction, to give users infinite content for instant gratification, or at the very least, the anticipation of such. The antidote to this compulsive, numbing overload will be found in deliberative friction, design patterns that introduce pause and reflection into digital interaction, or platforms and algorithms that create space for intention.

This is exactly the sort of deliberate control that email offers. This is not to say that email as it exists today is a perfect alternative, but the way it is ubiqutous and at the same time completely forgotten means that we have to make a deliberate attempt to understand the technologies that already exist in practice.