Here's the problem with email: An important part of the social contract is that you can't just go up to somebody an talk to them for hours and hours about some

Here's the problem with email: An important part of the social contract is that you can't just go up to somebody an talk to them for hours and hours about something they have no desire to talk about or even need to know. The central problem with email is that it makes it easy to do just this. How many hours and hours do you spend reading email? How many hours does your boss spend? Before email, if an executive wanted to talk with his whole organization, he had to get them all in an auditorium. It was visible to him that his whole organization was not working on any business objective, but sitting on their hands, listening to him tell them stuff which they mostly don't even need to hear. After email, an executive over a large organization can spend 10 minutes writing an email, which might only take 5 minutes to read, but is sent to so many people that in aggregate, it soaks up man-weeks of worth of time. And god forbid the email is ambiguous or needs clarification: any one of the recipients can hit reply-all and soak up yet another man week of aggregate time. Of course, any clarification need to be broadcast to everybody as well.... Even this wouldn't be fatal, but you are expected to have read, memorized, internalized, and institutionalized, obey, and actively comply with the contents of all those email. The question "Well, didn't you read my email?" impeaches the employee, with no hope of appeal, because it simultaneously, excuses the executive from any charges of not communicating their orders effectively. I sent an email, why are you ignoring me when I give you orders? There is no other channel of communication devised by the dark heart of man which has this ability for one person to arbitrarily condemn unlimited number of people to waste most of their time, reading stuff which probably doesn't apply to them, on pain of missing that one detail which they will be accountable for. If you go talk one-on-one to somebody, there is a proportional cost to you for how much you are costing them: you have to spend as much time talking as they do listening, so it provides a check to how much you were able to badger them. Even if you chat to many other people, chat is assumed to be ephemeral enough that it's not expected for you to remember every single thing said in the chat. After coming back from vacation, nobody is expected to read the chat logs for the days they were gone. But its not infrequent that after coming back from a week's vacation, you'll have to spend another week catching up on the email. Email violates the social contract. And it does so egregiously, because it actually makes violating the social contract the easiest thing to do, and not the hardest thing to do.