Slashdot Mirror
Tech Columnists' Day Without Email
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "When a recent power outage disrupted email service at WSJ.com, our tech columnists were plunged backwards into a time before every meeting, every little task, came with an email-program reminder, and where checking the bottom right of the screen for a new-mail envelope was futile. "Some of us quickly got a reminder that email is the lingua franca of projects that bridge different departments and involve a lot of people," Tim Hanrahan and Jason Fry write. "For all the talk of whiteboarding, it's email threads that we rely on to remember where we left certain questions and what our next moves are. Similarly, email has become our storage system for important documents and works in progress--how often do you email yourself? It's also replaced the telephone for lots of our routine touching base between colleagues, friends and families: Instant messaging is simultaneously too casual and too intrusive, and weekday phoning is reserved for more-substantive matters and emergencies. So a lot of that social lubrication went out the window.""
Let's not forget the chant of the manager "Get it in email". In some companies email is also used for the Wheel of Blame, everyones favorite management technique.
Do not talk to someone on the phone. Do not talk to him face to face. Do not IM him (and hey, what IT department hasn't locked IM along with everything else down anyhow). Ask questions and expect answers in email, or do it in meetings with witnesses. Leave a paper trail and keep it documented.
This sounds like cynicism, I think it is, but it's not mine. This is how many corporations appear to "work". Email is the ultimate accountability tool.
In the Foundation trilogy (*), Isaac Asmimov portrayed a stilted society full of academic "scientists" who never ventured into a lab, but did their scientific work by critiquing the work of others.
While he was mostly lampooning the way academic scholarship can replace actual research, I think he would have smiled knowingly. A news organization whose workers are lost without the ability to have news delivered to them would have fit perfectly into the pre-Mule galaxy.
Or maybe I'm just reading more into the story than the WSJ folkd deserve. Maybe it's just a sign of the times that email has so thoroughly penetrated business operations.
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(*) I haven't read Asimov in 20 years, so I apologize for my hazy memory and the arrogance to expound on it.
sigs, as if you care.