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The difference with phones is that when you call somebody, you have an incentive to keep the conversation short and to the point, because you are wasting your o

by rhelz 3y ago

The difference with phones is that when you call somebody, you have an incentive to keep the conversation short and to the point, because you are wasting your own time as fast as you are wasting his. Email has no such checks and balances: anybody in a 1,000 person organization can, at any time spend only 5 minutes of their time and cost the organization a man-week of effort to read it. That plus the fact that you are expected to wade through unlimited megabytes of text which has nothing to do with you, in order to find the few things you really do need to know, makes email uniquely rude.

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
That's just a potential downside of email. Any technology can be misused, email isn't unique. I haven't experienced your specific trauma so it doesn't scan to me as something defining about email, but I could name my own pet peeves about other media. Lots of technologies allow us to violate etiquette (or law) at a higher scale. Email is at least a throwback to the earlier internet, to a time before enshittification, before scams and bots and ads made up the bulk of the traffic.
- rhelz 3y ago
  Sure, any technology can be abused, but email makes abusing it to be the path of least resistance. For example, suppose you need to send an email to only 563 out of the 1000 people in your department. Are you going to take the names on the department mailing list, filter out the 437 people who don't need to read it, and send it just to the rest? Nobody's going to spend a half an hour doing that. They will just spam the department mailing list, knowing full well that 437 people are going to spend 5 minutes reading it to determine whether its something they need to pay attention to or not. 5 minutes * 437 people = 36 man hours wasted. Thats a man-week of wasted effort, to save you a half hour's worth of work. Is there any penalty for wasting a man-week of effort? No, because nobody will think about it this way---and email makes it the default action to waste everybody else's time. I, too, long for the ante-entshitificational internet, but IMHO, the enshittification of email was the leading wave of the trend....

by rhelz 3y ago

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago

That's just a potential downside of email. Any technology can be misused, email isn't unique. I haven't experienced your specific trauma so it doesn't scan to me as something defining about email, but I could name my own pet peeves about other media. Lots of technologies allow us to violate etiquette (or law) at a higher scale. Email is at least a throwback to the earlier internet, to a time before enshittification, before scams and bots and ads made up the bulk of the traffic.

rhelz 3y ago
Sure, any technology can be abused, but email makes abusing it to be the path of least resistance. For example, suppose you need to send an email to only 563 out of the 1000 people in your department. Are you going to take the names on the department mailing list, filter out the 437 people who don't need to read it, and send it just to the rest? Nobody's going to spend a half an hour doing that. They will just spam the department mailing list, knowing full well that 437 people are going to spend 5 minutes reading it to determine whether its something they need to pay attention to or not. 5 minutes * 437 people = 36 man hours wasted. Thats a man-week of wasted effort, to save you a half hour's worth of work. Is there any penalty for wasting a man-week of effort? No, because nobody will think about it this way---and email makes it the default action to waste everybody else's time. I, too, long for the ante-entshitificational internet, but IMHO, the enshittification of email was the leading wave of the trend....