In Praise of Email

-I-

   I was dean of arts and sciences at Northwestern University when I was asked, in the mid-eighties, whether I wanted to have email installed on my computer which I primarily used for word processing. My fairly quick response was “no, thank you; I don’t need another channel by means of which people can communicate with me.” My college consisted of about four hundred faculty members, a population not known to be shy about letting their dean know what they think and what they want. Nor did I look on this new facility as a way in which I might communicate with them; the fact is, I did not then really grasp its two-way potential.

   It was essentially left at that until I retired a few years later from being the University of Pittsburgh provost, losing the competent secretarial help which I had had for a decade and a half. A Pitt philosophy colleague was the departmental computer guru and came over to our house to set things up. It was he who gave me my user name—e-christened me, so to speak—and advised on passwords.  When he left the house I was ready to go, initially, as I recall, with Compuserve.

   My use of email began slowly, as I suppose it did for most people. Unless one made a deliberate effort, which I did not, to build up a cadre of email partners, this list accumulated by fits and starts, but that address book—or those “contacts”—did build up and continues to do so.

   It did not take all that long for me to become an avid emailer, though not what I’d call a typical one. The form of the messages I send is hardly different, if at all, from those I did and would write in a letter. (Writing letters and notes, after all, is what I did most of my life—though hardly any more.) Thus, I’ve taken neither to what have become email shorthand expressions nor to the symbols that have come into use. I can make out most of these, but have no active grasp of them. They are, at most, a part of my passive e-vocabulary. It helps that I type pretty fast, a skill acquired in typewriter days, so that is one transition I did not have to make.

   By now, emailing has become by far the most important and most used method for me to be in communication with other people. While of course I have been using the telephone just about all my life and use it for business—and, like it or not, put up with time consuming conversations with computers—I have never acquired the habit of frequently engaging in prolonged phone conversations with friends and family—though of course there have been such. As for the mail, now derogatively referred to as “snail mail,” what I send out is minimal and, more often than not, ceremonial greetings of various kinds, and what comes in is over 90% commercial: advertisements and solicitation for funds. It is clear that email—which is emphatically also not free of commercial communications—has replaced most of the communicating we used to do on paper.

-II-

   Now, I’ve entitled these remarks, “In Praise of Email,” so what’s so good about it? Let me start with a characteristic that is extrinsic, so to speak, to the way email is used—and one that I haven’t seen remarked upon. Assuming an emailer would in any case use a computer or other device and pay for internet or phone access, the use of email is free, costing nothing. One might think of the email system as a communication utility that enables the user to send messages to and receive communications from most places on the globe without forking out a cent. To my knowledge, there exists no other utility that costs nothing to its users.¹ If they thought about it, my teenage acquaintances would say, “awesome,” as well they should.

   Let me now turn to recite some of the peculiar advantages and conveniences of communication by email. [1] For starters, anyone minimally literate can make use of it. While that is of course also true of telephoning and letter writing, sending email messages has one signal advantage over telephoning: you can fiddle with your message until you get it the way you want to send it and, when that point is reached, click “send.” And while you can also rewrite a letter until you achieve want you want to convey, you either produce a scrawl with much crossing out or you waste a lot of paper and time redrafting your message.

   [2] My second advantage may seem like a minor thing, but I think of it as a great convenience; and if you think about it, you may as well. Unlike the use of the telephone where timing is dictated by a variety of schedules and customs (don’t call your mother-in-law at 3 am), you can send and accept messages whenever you want during the 24-hour day. As for letter writing, when you write is your choice, when you send is not.

   [3} Another aspect of that same discretionary possibility is much more important. Because sending an email message is not invasive, meaning that the recipient doesn’t have to read it, it frees the sender to shoot off what he or she has in mind without worrying too much whether the recipient wants to hear that. While I wouldn’t dream of calling up an old acquaintance to impart a bit of trivial information, nor bother to write a letter conveying it, I don’t hesitate to send an email, knowing it is readily ignored (and deleted) if not of interest. In several ways, then, emailing has probably increased the number of communications by which people inform each other about their thoughts. Too many? Maybe; but no one I know is staggering under their weight. Long live DELETE.

   Finally, a couple of remarks about what has been put forward as a disadvantage of emails as a system of communication. Until they came into existence, communications (not including telephone calls that were not recorded nor face-to-face conversations, ditto) were preserved on what have come to be called hard copies. Emails, on the other hand, are ephemeral: poof and they are gone. Efforts can of course be made to preserve: “The largest batch of Mrs. Clinton’s emails to date—some 7,000 pages—was released by the State Department Monday night . . . .” Still, what might have been a record of the past will not be available to future historians. Certainly a loss, an issue thoughtful historians should address and probably have.

   I conclude with a personal note. Three years ago I moved to Mexico City, while most of my friends and acquaintances, as well as the outfits with which I have business relations, reside in the US or even elsewhere on the globe. Email keeps me in touch, virtually without effort. A great boon: long live email!   

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¹Of course, much money is made on the internet by a multitude of companies and individuals, but I, as a user of gmail.com, pay nothing for possessing that service nor for the messages I send or receive by means of it—nor would I if I subscribed to gmail’s competitors.