I think each form of communicating has found its niche. For many things the phone is still the fastest way to get pieces of information, far faster than email or browsing a website. It is especially useful if I don't know what information I'm looking for, and have to bounce a lot of questions back and forth. Of course the phone carries it's own nuances, such as a certain importance to my questions. If I needed to talk to somebody important, I might email them instead, or just call a number I know will go to voicemail to wait for them to have to have free time.
Email is nice if I dont really want to talk, or if I need a long response/am speaking of something complicated, or if I don't care when my question is answered.
In short:if you need speed, use a phone and talk to somebody alive, if you have something low priority email is good, and I think the postal service is really good for things which absolutely must be read (invitations/legal documents/bills).
He does have a point about the incompatible systems. It was only when they all started to speak SMTP that email really started, and it was only when they gave up on their individual implementations, and spoke only SMTP, that email really took off.
MTP (RFC 772) was published in 1980. SMTP (RFC 788) is from late 81. UUCP was widely used to route e-mail between computers before that. The article dates from 1985 and there is no technical excuse not to integrate the different networks with the technology that has been, by then, available for years. When I got my first e-mail account, the form they mailed me showed both a modern "@" address (with a less than modern host.subdomain.domain.tld.country combo) and my bangpath from the backbone provider.
It's a fact all larger e-mail providers (like the ones mentioned in the article) either took very long to embrace open standards or failed completely to do so and vanished from the market. While I don't worry too much about karma, downmodding for no good reason is, well... Let's just say this is not Digg.
The article, of course, is discussing email as it existed in 1985 - where it indeed did suck. In fact, even in 1993, It was still pretty much impossible to send email to someone and be certain they could receive it. Heck, I'm prepared to suggest that even in 2000, (15 years later) you couldn't be certain that the person you were talking with had an Email address.
Today, though, I would suggest that the vast majority of people in North America have an Email Address.
Where the article really goes awry is in this paragraph:
"Chances are that before a universal e-mail network is ever developed, the whole idea of electronic mail, along with those of teletext and videotex, will have been reduced to the span of a few specialized applications. As a general means of information exchange, the concepts are technologically intriguing. But they are economically naive and, more importantly, no more convenient than the existing alternatives. "
Bold prediction, but absolutely, totally, incontrovertibly - wrong.
"But the real future of the laptop computer will remain in the specialized niche markets. Because no matter how inexpensive the machines become, and no matter how sophisticated their software, I still can't imagine the average user taking one along when going fishing."
"I'm prepared to suggest that even in 2000, (15 years later) you couldn't be certain that the person you were talking with had an Email address."
You still can't. As you point out, the vast majority of people have one, but a significant number still doesn't, for various reasons. Email would be less common among, for example, people in rural areas, the elderly, and those who just aren't very interested in this internet thing. Yet all those people usually have phones and can be reached by snail mail... so email still hasn't completely caught up yet.
Also, this prediction is from 1985. It turned out to be completely wrong, but it would have taken quite a visionary to predict the situation in 2010. It wouldn't have been hard to predict in 1985 that future computers would be faster and have more memory and storage space, but going from "64K in a breadbox" to gigabytes of storage, ubiquitous and cheap computers (often embedded in other technology), wireless connections, etc, would have required quite a mental leap. (The point being, that in the 1985 environment, email wouldn't have made a lot of sense, while in 2010 it does. Or actually some people seem to think it's becoming old-fashioned... but that's a different story.)
I couple of years ago I actually gave up on spam and decided to rely on the Thunderbird spam filter.
That implies that email is no longer a reliable way to contact me, because of possible false positives :-( I suspect I am not alone with that problem. GMail seems to have false positives, too.
So email was fine for a while, but it is not anymore. Unfortunately I don't know what to replace it with.
As odd as it may sound, the problems discussed in the article were in great part solved by AOL. As annoying as it might have been then, and as laughable as it is now, AOL played an important part in getting the masses into the email world. The business sector may have been different, but email in the social world grew through AOL.
And indeed, the continued existence and use of both the telephone and the postal service demonstrate in an unarguable way that email is not "more efficient" - it's just different.
Email, telephone and the postal service are three different modes of communication, each of which is useful for a specific category of communication. To that list, I'd add Twitter, IM, IRC, online forums/BBs/newsgroups, social news sites, talking in person, having a meeting, sleeping together, having a fight, having a meal, going out drinking, etc.
Each of those modes of communication is appropriate in a specific set of circumstances for a specific type of communication. None of them is "more efficient" in an absolute sense. It depends on the context.
Which makes me think of a debate that was going on around 1994. It was Gopher versus the World Wide Web. The two are complementary it was said.
I think email and traditional letters are not complementary. The overlap is almost 100%. The only thing that keeps the paper letter alive is the lack of ubiquitous and legally binding electronic identity and signature. It's not alive because it is more convenient or a different mode of communication.
Package delivery is obviously a very different case because it's not information that is transferred.
Letters are still useful for certain kinds of communication. Romantic love emails just don't cut it, for example.
I'll grant you that there is some overlap between email and written letters, though. However, the postal service carries all sorts of things, not just letters.
E-mail and telephone both cover different situations. Telephone is more personal, contains information about emotions, feelings and context of the talk. If the information is about bidirectional feedback then telephone is much better than E-mail. Since they cover different situations you can't say what the title say.
With e-mail you can send spam to thousand of people, you can send e-mail to people that don't know you and that don't care about you. E-mail is like fruit in a tin, telephone is fresh fruit.
17 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 47.5 ms ] threadEmail is nice if I dont really want to talk, or if I need a long response/am speaking of something complicated, or if I don't care when my question is answered.
In short:if you need speed, use a phone and talk to somebody alive, if you have something low priority email is good, and I think the postal service is really good for things which absolutely must be read (invitations/legal documents/bills).
It's a fact all larger e-mail providers (like the ones mentioned in the article) either took very long to embrace open standards or failed completely to do so and vanished from the market. While I don't worry too much about karma, downmodding for no good reason is, well... Let's just say this is not Digg.
Today, though, I would suggest that the vast majority of people in North America have an Email Address.
Where the article really goes awry is in this paragraph:
"Chances are that before a universal e-mail network is ever developed, the whole idea of electronic mail, along with those of teletext and videotex, will have been reduced to the span of a few specialized applications. As a general means of information exchange, the concepts are technologically intriguing. But they are economically naive and, more importantly, no more convenient than the existing alternatives. "
Bold prediction, but absolutely, totally, incontrovertibly - wrong.
December 25, 1984
"Windows failed, a doom I preannounce for the yet to be released Microsoft version"
http://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/25/science/value-of-windowing...
December 8, 1985
"But the real future of the laptop computer will remain in the specialized niche markets. Because no matter how inexpensive the machines become, and no matter how sophisticated their software, I still can't imagine the average user taking one along when going fishing."
http://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/08/business/the-executive-com...
I'm not sure if it makes me want to buy his book or not :
They All Laughed When I Sat Down at the Computer: And Other True Tales of One Man's Struggle With Personal Computing
http://www.amazon.com/They-Laughed-When-Down-Computer/dp/013...
You still can't. As you point out, the vast majority of people have one, but a significant number still doesn't, for various reasons. Email would be less common among, for example, people in rural areas, the elderly, and those who just aren't very interested in this internet thing. Yet all those people usually have phones and can be reached by snail mail... so email still hasn't completely caught up yet.
Also, this prediction is from 1985. It turned out to be completely wrong, but it would have taken quite a visionary to predict the situation in 2010. It wouldn't have been hard to predict in 1985 that future computers would be faster and have more memory and storage space, but going from "64K in a breadbox" to gigabytes of storage, ubiquitous and cheap computers (often embedded in other technology), wireless connections, etc, would have required quite a mental leap. (The point being, that in the 1985 environment, email wouldn't have made a lot of sense, while in 2010 it does. Or actually some people seem to think it's becoming old-fashioned... but that's a different story.)
That implies that email is no longer a reliable way to contact me, because of possible false positives :-( I suspect I am not alone with that problem. GMail seems to have false positives, too.
So email was fine for a while, but it is not anymore. Unfortunately I don't know what to replace it with.
It's SMS.
http://www.ctia.org/consumer_info/service/index.cfm/AID/1032...
SMS volume in the US spiked after interoperability between carriers became a reality from 2003 - 2005.
Prior to 2003, Europeans and Asians turned their noses down at their American counterparts because "Americans just didn't text."
From here:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-06-02-text-me-main_x....
At the time, only "12% of cell phone users in the USA send or receive text messages."
And from recent times:
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/dec/16/nation/la-na-census-...
Email, telephone and the postal service are three different modes of communication, each of which is useful for a specific category of communication. To that list, I'd add Twitter, IM, IRC, online forums/BBs/newsgroups, social news sites, talking in person, having a meeting, sleeping together, having a fight, having a meal, going out drinking, etc.
Each of those modes of communication is appropriate in a specific set of circumstances for a specific type of communication. None of them is "more efficient" in an absolute sense. It depends on the context.
I think email and traditional letters are not complementary. The overlap is almost 100%. The only thing that keeps the paper letter alive is the lack of ubiquitous and legally binding electronic identity and signature. It's not alive because it is more convenient or a different mode of communication.
Package delivery is obviously a very different case because it's not information that is transferred.
I'll grant you that there is some overlap between email and written letters, though. However, the postal service carries all sorts of things, not just letters.
With e-mail you can send spam to thousand of people, you can send e-mail to people that don't know you and that don't care about you. E-mail is like fruit in a tin, telephone is fresh fruit.