[ih] deterioration of email (was Re: clever usc creation)

[Jack Haverty]

The terminology used by someone may differ (text, DM, message, email, 
...) but the meaning is the same.   They all mean "I'll send you 
something".   The "something" is usually a short alphanumeric text, but 
it might also be several pictures or even an audio or video.   My 
experience has been that people use different terminology now, but they 
usually mean they'll interact with you using the same system they use to 
communicate with their friends.  That defines, for each individual, what 
it means to "be on the 'net."

Corporations and people seem mostly to have forgotten Metcalfe's Law - 
paraphrasing, that the value of a network is the square (IIRC) of the 
number of people and services accessible through the network.

In the 1980s, I remember some new hire who told me that he had gotten a 
better offer from another company, but at BBN he would continue to have 
access to email and at the other company he would not.  Access to email 
was valuable to him, likely as a way to keep in contact with his friends 
and contacts from school.

That "value" is another part of Internet Economics which has changed 
over time as the Internet has shattered into a plethora of 
non-interoperable communication mechanisms for humans to interact with 
each other, even if all those mechanisms operate over the same 
underlying datagram transport infrastructure.

When such services were starting to appear, decades ago, it was common 
for them to somehow be interconnected, becoming more useful and valuable 
by following Metcalfe's Law.  That value equation changed over time as 
the Internet evolved.

A new version of Metcalfe's Law might be "The value of a network service 
is proportional to the square of the number of my friends that I can 
interact with using that network."

Personally, I thought the Internet was much more useful when I didn't 
have to check so many different "mailboxes" to "read my mail".

/Jack Haverty

On 8/1/26 00:10, Dave Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
> On 7/29/2026 11:39 AM, Dan York via Internet-history wrote:
>> But for many, perhaps most, people "email" now means whatever they 
>> now use to communicate with their friends.
>
> Dan,
>
> I don't think so.  First, they would not then also say that email is 
> for old folk.  Also, other words get used for their default.
>
> I was intrigued, in Europe, to have someone say they would text me and 
> it turned out they meant Whatsapp.  (It was purely an accident that I 
> had whatsapp running and got their message.)
>
> As noted earlier on this thread, other folk refer to Direct Messages 
> (DM) which means whatever less-public channel is provided by their 
> social platform.
>
> d/
>

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