The death of Email

[andrewducker]

There's something about e-mail that demands a reply, demands a response. But when you’re getting thousands of these things, it becomes an impossibility to respond to everything. So we’ve got to shift the etiquette, and maybe make e-mail more like publishing: that is, you send something out and you might get one percent response. I think that the paradigm of e-mail as letters, as objects, is inappropriate. I'm waiting for a shift to the timeline, rather than the object, as the organizing principle. If you think about a blog for instance, that’s a timeline. And it’s a really good way of organizing huge amounts of information, because we’re quite good at sequencing.

From here.

[Poll #149870]

Comments

[andrewducker]

I phone my mum twice a week, she being the only person I know who doesn't check her email daily. Except for my grandmother, who gets a 3-monthly letter.

Other than that, I never phone anyone uless I have a specific thing to say that needs answering then/there, or am saying "I'm outside Sainsburies, where are you?" in an attempt to meet up with people.