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A Theory on Recreating Email
- tzs 15y agoAnother blog fucked by OnSwipe.
- quanticle 15y agoAt first there would no doubt be piles of email in everyone’s account at the start of each day. But gradually that will decrease. Just think — all the email that gets generated because of back and forths outside of work hours will gradually ease. And since you know you can only reach people during the workday, people might actually start walking over to someone else’s office/desk. Or picking up the phone. Remember the phone? I loved the phone. So quick and easy to resolve a tricky question over the phone, a little back and forth dialog, you can quickly clarify misunderstandings. Ahh….the phone. This brings up a fundamental impedance mismatch between "digital outsiders", who have to learn how to use computerized systems and "digital natives", who grow up with these systems and integrate them into their daily lives. The author thinks of e-mail as a synchronous protocol - something like the phone, but minus the social protocol and human contact. E-mail, however, isn't synchronous. Its asynchronous. The fact that someone sends e-mail at 1 a.m. doesn't mean that you have to reply by 1:30 a.m. It doesn't even mean that you have to send e-mail at 1 a.m. yourself. The entire point of e-mail is that you don't have to respond right away. You respond whenever you want.