Posts tagged "communication":

Email as a Revolutionary Medium

In an increasingly interconnected and technologically sophisticated world, our capabilities for communication and diversity of ways to do so also increases. This is often approached as a problem, with each method merely remaining due to network effects, but I believe that this multitude of means are a strength and not a weakness. I do however still see what I deem as a misuse of tools, and I shall endeavour to explain, and hopefully convince you of, my ways of structuring communication in different spheres.

The key difference that I think many do not make is the division between urgency and importance. This might seem an unwieldy or arbitrary division, but I believe it is crucial. In many cases needing an answer quickly is the only thing one cares about, and in others it is the accuracy of the response that matters. To explain simply, here an order of different modes of communications:

Urgency	Importance	Means
1	3	Call
2	4	Text
3	5	Third-party messaging
4	2	Email
5	1	In-person

Sorted by importance:

Urgency	Importance	Means
5	1	In-person
4	2	Email
1	3	Call
2	4	Text
3	5	Third-party messaging

When you want to be very clear about something you always want to meet in person, and if speed is necessary nothing is faster than calling someone’s cellphone. But there is one medium that has been overlooked, or in many cases even despised, email.

The Indieweb wiki’s section on email describes an “Older [reason] to use email” as “messaging among older internet users” as if this is an archaic or outdated form of messaging. This is echoed by my anecdotal experiences with talking to younger generations of people who in many cases detest email, having only used it in a professional setting and for making “accounts” to websites that then flood them with newsletters and advertisements. I understand these experiences that I imagine many people have, but they do not mean that email should be thrown out altogether. Instead it should occupy a new place in the way people communicate.

The word revolution has an interesting history, meaning both a transformative change in a given field (although often political) as well as a simple revolution of a spinning object, returning to its starting position (see RPM; revolutions per minute)¹. These two seemingly homonymous words are however deeply interconnected, and to explain this I want to use the example of the Glorious Revolution. It was not only a profound political development, overthrowing the established idea of the divine right of kings and replacing it with popular sovereignty, but also formulating it as a return to the normal political order of the ancient rights of the English people². The Meiji Restoration in Japan was also of this nature, a profound and forward-looking development that framed itself as a return to the original state of things.

So what does this have to do with email communication for the kidz? I see email as a niche that no other medium occupies, that being asynchronous communication. All communication is of course asynchronous in some sense, but there is an expectation that texting should ideally be done instantly and intensely. One is expected to respond quickly, and “leaving” someone “on read” is seen as an insult. I think that this form of synchronous communication, when combined with the scale of modern technology, creates enormous stress on the individual. At all times one is able to intimately³ communicate with thousands of people, leaving the individual paralysed from overstimulation. Email by contrast emphasises long-form messaging, often being longer than posts on microblogging services meant for permanent or semi-permanent publication. This gives the individual more time to respond but also the sender to live their own life while waiting for a response. Originally this was of course a technological necessity — it was impossible to reach someone through the internet when they were not at their computer — but that limitation has since disappeared through the introduction of the cellular phone and later the smartphone.

This does not mean that the problems with email are not real but that they are obscuring the usefulness of the technology. The primary change I would recommend (or that needs to be done) is the division between communication and information. There is no denying that a lot of services rely on email for registration and advertisements. But there is a clear mental barrier between receiving an email from a real human being and a machine sending you a morass of spam that one is not expected to reply to, but simply to consume⁴. The greatest damage to email has been done by no-reply@domain.com. To counter this one needs multiple email addresses, one for machine communication that is seldom used and another for human connection. This allows for the mental separation of messages so that the enormous flood of email does not drown out the signal, and so that individuals are not anxious when they are sent an email.