Email is Lousy

Email sucks...

There I said it, and for as much as I rely on this post internet wonder drug, Email is surely one of the worst inventions of mankind for certain types information exchanges. You know the kind of exchanges where people used to get together face to face and iron out differences in a discussion. Sure email is fantastic for those times when one party needs to inform another party of some static topic. The fields in the file are as follows, the phone number of that person is, the directions to the party are, all are easily transferred to their recipients via email with little or no problems. Other discussions that have deeper meaning or have a bidirectional element woven into their fiber reveal a startling shortcoming in the typical email exchange. Most importantly email lacks that all important human element where one party can gauge the mood of the other side and adjust the conversation accordingly. In some ways email great strength for one task is also its downfall when applied to another task. Email is fast but its not immediate, it also has that ‘say it now and listen to it later’ element. This is all well and good for unidirectional information exchanges but falls apart in any form of multidirectional information exchange. Add this shortcoming to the lack of email to convey mood, and you have a recipe for trouble. I write this not to convey some great understanding onto the internet masses. I am sure this is not news to a great many of you folks out there in internet land, but more as a reminder to my own thickness on the subject and a warning to myself to avoid using the medium for things that it is ill suited for, maybe then I will avoid issues like last weeks debacle.