It seems that the meme-of-the-day is predicting the demise of email as a communications medium – those that know lots about this kind of thing, such as Stowe Boyd and Chris Pirillo, are clear and vocal in their belief that email is the tool of the devil and should be consigned to history forthwith.
I certainly won’t deny that email has its problems – from spam to overload and more – but I can’t help but feel that to misquote Mark Twain, reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. Despite the downsides, there doesn’t appear to be anything waiting in the wings that can deal with what I would consider to be some of the major advantages of email as a communications tool.
Email is a de-facto lowest common denominator
With few exceptions, when I send an email I know that the recipient will be able to open and read the contents. There are a few plain-text extremists around who will refuse to accept HTML-formatted messages, but these are the online equivalent of non-smokers who would put out your cigarette with a fire extinguisher if you lit up in their presence. Individuals without email addresses are few and far between – we seem to have progressed past the point where access to email required the justification of a business case – so it’s become an assumption that it’s a valid way to communicate. That’s taken a long time to develop – so to expect that we’re all going to switch any time soon to RSS, or instant messaging, or whatever alternative technologies exist – is optimistic to say the least.
Email is asynchronous
Something that instant messaging advocates often ignore, I think, is that email is an asynchronous medium – it doesn’t matter if I’m not logged in at the time when the message arrives, because it will be stored for me to deal with later. While this might not be a problem for those who spend their days wholly online, most of us spend more time away from a screen than not – and if I’m not there, an instant message will go unanswered.
To be sure, email has an unfortunate latency for quick queries that would be better resolved through a swift face-to-face interaction, but this ignores the fact that a lot of the time, people don’t actually want to be interrupted. Closing an email client and ignoring the ‘new message’ flag is a valid way of scheduling your interactions in way that makes best use of your time, rather than being forced to respond at the behest of your interrogator.
Email is cross-cultural
As a straight-laced Brit, I’m not all that comfortable with pinging an IM to a complete stranger, or someone that I don’t have a particularly strong relationship with already (and I’m probably more laid-back than most of my fellow Brits, given that I’m a hair-trigger geek with a different messaging account for every day of the week.) And if we Brits are straight-laced about this, Asian cultures are even more averse to this kind of interaction – it would be considered actively rude to engage in an interactive, unsolicited communication in many Asian cultures, for example. Despite the scope for misunderstanding and miscommunication, email provides an acceptable sense of distance to allow for a relationship to develop – the language of messages can casualise over the course of the interaction, whereas it’s far more difficult to be as formal in an instant message.
This isn’t a problem if you’re working within an coherent organisation that can override these kind of cultural imperatives, but if you’re interacting with individuals from different cultures and backgrounds, it’s a mistake to assume that what works in Armpit, Nebraska, will work in South-East Asia – or even Europe.
Email is auditable
This point came to me in a conversation with a senior manager in a project management role, who related a horror story of specifications evolving over the course of numerous IM interactions – only for the changes to become the source of a “my word against yours situation” when problems started to occur. In an ideal world, these situations wouldn’t arise in the first place – but we live in imperfect times, so there’s sometimes a valid place for a communication tool with a built-in audit trail.
I don’t deny that email has its fair share of problems – and I don’t seem to suffer unduly from spam, so I have to be careful about drawing conclusions from my experiences alone. There are technologies around, such as RSS, which would appear to solve some (if not all) of the more serious flaws of email. But I do wonder if in their eagerness to move to the Next Big Thing, the earliest of early adopters aren’t in danger of leaving the rest of us behind?
