From a review of Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home in The New York Review of Books:
"Just because we have email we shouldn't use it for everything," Shipley and Schwalbe write, introducing a notion that younger readers may find too radical to take seriously.Brief aside: If the quote from Send is right, it reveals a more pernicious attitude of "Just because we have editors doesn't mean we should use them for everything."
Perhaps The New York Review of Books has a lower bound for its readers' ages of 30, because the younger people I know don't view e-mail as a default choice at all. My generation (approximately 40 years old) is far more likely to default to e-mail as the best or easiest way to communicate. Younger people are more likely to use AIM, text messages, phone calls, really anything but e-mail. They view e-mail as stuffy, old-fashioned, too formal, too slow, and increasingly broken by the spam and spam filters that together make e-mail both painful and unreliable.
The recent parody flowchart meme was capped off by Lifehacker reposting a nice older flowchart from Salon showing some of the myriad communication choices in a business setting that are not e-mail. A simpler version for younger people in a personal setting would show e-mail as a last resort, following questions such as "Is the person I'm trying to reach an old fogey? Yes: Try e-mail. No: Try something better." I suspect that The New York Review of Books is assuming a readership for whom the first and final question on a communication flowchart is "Can I send it from my Blackberry?"
4 comments:
I wonder to what extent our mini-generation's use of email is conditioned by our experience growing up with telephones. That is, those of us born between, say, 1965 or so and 1980 or so lived through the decline of the landline telephone as an instrument of communication. We are old enough to remember before answering machines were common, and then when car phones and then cellular phones became common. We like email for a variety of reasons, and generally thought of it as a sort of improvement, rather than as a baseline for communication.
Also, with timing being the way it was, we were introduced to email in a moderately formal context, most of us, and saw its benefits for moderately formal communications. Now that we're forty or so, we really want moderately formal communication, because we have jobs and haircuts and responsibilities and all that shit.
email is terrific for saying "do the following five things today or you are fired/sleeping on the couch" or responding "I have done three of those five things, one is waiting on Suarez in HR, and one was done last week, as you can see by the email I'm attaching". IM and txt and even phone calls are lousy at that. Many people under thirty probably have fewer of those kinds of messages, nor do they want those kinds of messages or their connotations. People over sixty don't want them, either, I suspect. So perhaps it has to do with a nice coincidence of our current stage of life and the timing of communication choice development.
Or I'm just talking through my hat, which happens, too.
Thanks,
-V.
It depends on whether you see e-mail replacing snail mail, office memos, or phone calls. It was touted first as replacing various printed communication (part of the "paperless office" hoax), but served well for replacing a lot of phone tag before cell phones became dominant.
And it really doesn't seem fair that I have to sleep on the couch just because Suarez in HR won't do the dishes sooner.
I don't know. A colleague yesterday suggested that texting was the new e-mail and that if I texted my assignments to students, they would pay more attention to it. I didn't add that I had never texted in my life and had only just figured out how to filter my own e-mail without assistance. Oh well, in my day, I remember these things called typewriters. One thing she also said was that she wasn't sure that I was supposed to text; that there was a barrier still on its use for some things. But my University just asked for my cell number so they can text me in the event of some sort of VATech calamity. So maybe the barriers are lifting as to who can text whom.
I thought texting was for short messages. How would you send an assignment that way?
I've been trying to convince a company that phone calls should be the new e-mail. They don't publish their phone number, instead steering people to AIM or chat rooms. For me, those options would be a distant second to a phone call even if the response were quick. But in fact they don't monitor their chat room and take anywhere from minutes to literally hours to reply on AIM. I wonder if they're a transitional generation too old to understand how to use these new tools properly, but too young to feel comfortable using older forms.
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