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Re: The Monstrosity Email Has Become

So much good stuff here. Read and ponder. More thoughts later mebbe.

Replies

mntn: Re: The Monstrosity Email Has Become

> So email started as a letter-writing metaphor, and somehow it’s become more of a telegram: a tool for rapid memo dissemination and general notifications, with little attention paid to craft and composition.

I’m old enough to have actually sent letters. Emails for me (I got my first account in 1992) were never like letters.

The “letter writing” metaphor only ever extended to the external form - “mail”, “mailbox”, “delivery”. From the first get-go emails were less formal than letters, more like postcards.

> So let’s say that someone designs a new protocol that is designed for slow, thoughtful conversations, without depending on a centralized provider. How do you prevent it from becoming as overloaded as email? From my perspective, I think you have to revisit the original letter metaphor.

Entirely unneeded in my opinion, it’s trying to force email into something it never was. You want to send letters? Write a letter!

/Update 2021-10-22/ mntn has done the research and replied

gemini://mntn.xyz/posts/2021-10-21-on-the-history-of-email-a-reply-to-my-reply/

I’m in broad agreement. I also can’t deny that there have been long and meaningful interpersonal emails but they are by their very nature private. I can just state from my experience that I would have reserved those communications for a real letter back when I actually had these relationships (don’t ask).

In professional email, I can switch from a quick “I have received your email and acknowledge” and more lengthy, in-depth explanations of issues. This is quite unique to email, while there were no doubt short snappy letters sent in a professional environment, the per-letter “startup cost” meant you’d probably pick up the phone instead. Email spans that gap quite nicely.

Email is also very easily one-to-many and many-to-many, in a way that letters aren’t. Sure there were mailing lists but again, they were generally one author sending to many, the *replies* were redirected back to one person, not to everyone in the list, like now. Again, quite unprecedented.

Anyway, email is a fore-runner of the modern network phenomenon of “instant feedback”. While a newspaper, magazine or newsletter had feedback, it was filtered by the necessity of actually sitting down and writing a letter and sending it off. A website with comments, a mailing list, or Twitter all make the cost of feedback virtually nil. Now, unless it’s in a mailing list environment, the instant feedback to all is generally a mistake (reply-to: ALL) but it’s part of the system that’s been built.

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Friday, 2021-10-22

✽ Wednesday, 2021-10-20

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