The End of the Email Era

Does anyone wonder if this is a good thing?

Not about email in particular. I'd agree that email is being used less and less in favor of other, more instant, forms of communication. And if email died and was replaced by something else, that wouldn't bother me at all.

What increasingly bothers me is that we are reaching a point that the only way to keep up with other people is to do it tweet by tweet and photo by photo. Sure, this is much higher bandwidth than the Christmas State-Of-The-Family letter we used to send each other, but it's also much more time consuming.

It takes a ton of time to sift through all that raw data and keep up with what is going on. Instead of Alice going on vacation and spending a couple hours summarizing it in an email to friends and family, you have each friend spending a couple hours sifting through Alice's photos, which she threw up on Facebook unfiltered. Total time outlay before was higher for Alice and lower for the friends. Now the situation is reversed.

Personally, it means I keep up with fewer friends than before, or at least it feels that way because I feel like I can't keep up. It's just too much effort. I find it kind of odd that we expect people to just constantly be living our lives alongside us by following our every action online. What was wrong with actually telling other people the important stuff?

I know I sound like an old fogey saying all this (I'm only 26), but it's honestly how I feel. It seems like there was value in the old model of editorializing your own life and presenting it to others. Have you ever sat through a slideshow of family photos? Did your eyes glaze over after photo 39 of Uncle Arty's 40th birthday, which happened before you were even born? That is how I feel whenever I log into Facebook.

Of course, I'm not saying this because I think everything is going to pot. I know we will find a balance. I mainly wonder where that balance will be, and whether anyone else feels this way.

Good point @Xichekolas: We don't editorializing our own life and are not aware what information we give away to whom anymore. In the old old days, people didn't knew your last name untill someone else introduced you. Now people don't even bother to know your last name. They rather have your nickname or e-mailaddress (or fb profile).

We have no control on what kind of information lands where. Be it your SSN or where you last went on vacation. And we certainly don't know with what purpose the other party gains that information. For me, I don't care about pageviews, hits or anything that projects me as being popular or noticed. I want to know the party who is receiving information about me and the purpose of what is going to happen with that information. If I show people a slideshow of family photos I certainly know they don't get a copy unless I provide it to them. In the digital era it is quite different. Sharing is nice only if you can measure what it will deliver back to you. For now, only bad things can happen if you give up your privacy.

I'd mention jabber in contrast to the email :D

"—Ms. Vascellaro is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau. She can be reached at jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com"

Funny how she posts her email address instead of her fb profile.