[ih] In defence of email, the tech marvel we couldn’t do without (Joanne McNeil)

[the keyboard of geoff goodfellow]

*Don’t blame the medium for our inbox anxiety. The more fundamental issue
is how work dominates our lives*
EXCERPT:

I am about to defend the seemingly indefensible: email, the inbox, all of
it. And yes, I’m offering this case at a time when it might sound
especially unlikely. This is the season of holiday responder messages and
out-of-office replies. The back-and-forth of delayed communications makes
email an especially draining project during the summer.

I’m not unfamiliar with the paralysing anxiety that settles in when I see a
notification that my unread messages total some ungodly number. I probably
owe an email to a percentage of people reading this. (Sorry! Things are a
bit busy!) And I’d love to never see the words “hope this message finds you
well” again in my life. But the decentralised wonder that is email isn’t
the cause of my stress; the real problem is work and too much of it, as
relayed through these messages. When it comes to communications systems,
email – a technology that’s 50 years old this year – is hard to beat.

Email is the product of a number of independently forged developments. In
1965, Tom Van Vleck and Noel Morris
<https://multicians.org/thvv/mail-history.html> released a computer
messaging program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As part of
what’s known as a time-sharing system, users at individual terminals could
message other users that were all connected to the same mainframe computer.
Four years later, Charley Kline at UCLA and Bill Duvall at Stanford
Research Institute contacted each other
<https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114280698&t=1625224505210>
in
the first Arpanet connection. This was a publicly funded network system
powered by packet-switching – a method of data transmission that would
become the basis for the internet. Their exchange could be compared to two
people with walkie-talkies – you could only reach the other person holding
the device.

In 1971, the Arpanet programmer Ray Tomlinson
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/07/ray-tomlinson-email-inventor-and-selector-of-symbol-dies-aged-74>
put
these advances together when he sent a message that most closely resembles
email as we now know it. It combined the Arpanet packet-switching network
connection with the user-to-user communication that had been developed for
time-sharing systems. His program employed the “@” symbol to distinguish
the recipient as a specific user at a specific computer location. This
messaging system grew popular, and over the following decade developers
refined email to include features such as folders, replies (Re:) and
autoresponders...

[...]
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/06/email-inbox-anxiety-work

-- 
Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
living as The Truth is True