NYT: A Eulogy for the Long, Intimate Email

[kaptitsky]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/st...ate-email.html

The nonstop deluge of professional emails has trained us to ignore messages irrelevant to us (or, often, delete them without even reading). Other easily dismissed digital communication — texts, tweets, Instagrams — have also dulled our response skills. If it’s fully permissible to trash upon receipt an intraoffice email from human resources, it seems fine to blow off a friend’s check-in (or to reply curtly). Fifteen years ago, this would have been considered rude. But now, Mr. Freeman said, even people who don’t work in film “know what the ‘L.A. no’ is: that silence is a reply.”

[David]

We who still write letters (snail mail style) and actually receive a written reply, should be grateful methinks. I know I am

[kijinbear]

The newest generation may be even more averse to email. "I have a nephew in England who's 12, and I asked for his email address, and he said he didn’t have one but we could talk on Viber,"

Ask the nephew again next year. He'll probably have gone through a couple of similar walled gardens by then. He might not even remember what he was using last year. Whatever it was, it probably doesn't even exist anymore.

Remember when we had to switch email addresses every once in a while because we ran out of space in our previous freemail account, or because the freemail provider abruptly went out of business? That was the wild wild west of email, but those days are firmly in our past. It seems that instant messaging is going through the same phase right now. I wonder what all those proprietary platforms will look like 20 years from now. Maybe they'll finally have figured out how to communicate with people who are using different services, but maybe I'm too optimistic