Slashdot Mirror
Is Email 'Bankrupt'?
Gary W. Longsine writes "The Washington Post writes about a Venture Capitalist and blogger, Fred Wilson, who recently declared 'e-mail bankruptcy', wiping out his inbox and starting over because he couldn't keep up. Spam is cited as one reason. There have been several public incidents, some cited in the article, where the flow of email is just too much to keep up. 'If there is a downside to completely turning a back on e-mail, it's not one many former users notice. Stanford computer science professor Donald E. Knuth started using e-mail in 1975 and stopped using it 15 years later. Knuth said he prefers to concentrate on writing books rather than be distracted by the steady stream of communication.' Is email just too hectic a communication form for some people? Is email dead?"
I particularly like the guy at work who walks over to my desk and says, "Hey there, did you get my email?" when he sent it about 30 seconds ago. What the fuck is he doing? Sending me an email so he can come over and talk to me about whatever it is that's in the email and then wasting my time even more?
I've started taking the approach of answering "No, but when I do I'll let you know if there are any questions. Right now I'm kind of busy..." What I really want to do is bitch whip him with my mouse.
When properly used, I like email in that it provides an asynchronous means of communication which does not become time dependent. I can send someone an email at 2:30AM when I happen to awake and just check for an answer later that day or the next. If I really need an instant reply, there's always the phone.
But I do think there are a lot of people in the world who's email is effectively broken because they cannot keep up with the spam that comes in.
Could it get better if there were not so many owned machines?