All those clever forwards go unread
Imagine that. Slate has an article foretelling the death of email as all those AIM-addicted teens and tweens start growing up and into positions of power and responsibility. They say that like it’s a bad thing, but interesting read nonetheless.
I’m 40 and I hate email. Well, that’s not exactly right. I hate its ubiquity as a communications tool.
I like email when it’s person to person or even person to a few people, even organization to person when sender and recipient want and expect the communication.
I almost always prefer email to phone conversations and most definitely prefer it to voice mail.
But as a mass communications medium, I loathe it. I work for an advocacy organization and I do advocacy for other causes in my spare time (which is… a bit tight of late) so I’ve had to view email as a necessary evil.
The email lovers have always said – and I’ve had no counter argument – that love it or hate it, it’s effective.
That might have been true ten years ago, but it’s much less the case now, and it’s getting worse year by year, month by month.
Despite all the effort put into planning email campaigns, honing messages, and using ever more sophisticated mail bomb applications, bulk email response rates are getting worse.
Of course no one in the biz will admit that (at least not until they’ve found a replacement) and the Spam of the Angels folks will keep on plugging away, as I do, arguing the answer is to get a bigger list, write a tighter message, or make a funnier viral ad.
But we’ve got to keep our eyes on the horizon. As spam outnumbers wanted email by almost a factor of ten, and as all of us born with an @ in our names types retire or die, email will die with us and our fax machines.
Will it ruin the english language, or engender a generation of adults who write like six year olds? Maybe. But at least they’ll write short, write so that others can read them quickly, not like me.
