Five exabytes of distraction
Rick Nelson, Chief Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 5/1/2007
E-mail’s role as the pre-eminent Internet application may be ending. Evidence mounts that e-mail is becoming an unreliable communications method—choked with spam and irrelevant messages—that faces competition from instant messaging, VoIP, and social networking.
| Read more about changes in the role of e-mail and post your comments on Rick's blog. |
As for young adults, I commented on March 5 on the difficulty college administrators have contacting students, in part because students lose or ignore e-mail messages. E-mail’s deficiency in this regard was made horribly clear at Virginia Tech. By some accounts, social-networking sites like Facebook have been more effective than standard e-mail at informing students of the events of April 16.
Text messaging, too, is proving its value as an alternative. Text messages to 67,000 students at the University of Texas at Austin in January notified them of an impending ice storm and kept them safe indoors.
In the business world, sheer e-mail volume—which IDC expects to approach 5 exabytes worldwide in 2007—suggests that e-mail has staying power. But even for corporate users, e-mail is losing its luster, a fact that Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Fry attributes to “…the rising tide of unnecessary e-mail that threatens to drown us in apathy and distraction.”
The problem is that the cost of messages is born almost entirely by the recipient. Various schemes have been proposed to alter this fact—one is Get Back Software’s PostWare, which imposes noncash postage on messages. The drawback is that it only works within an organization’s internal e-mail system, but it seems to be a step in the right direction of being able to imbue truly important e-mail messages with the significance of an overnight FedEx package.
Of course, any communications channel can be no better than the message crafted to go over it. Anticipating the January ice storm, UT-Austin administrators had a crystal-clear message: “Stay home.” It’s far less clear what message Virginia Tech administrators could have transmitted that would have significantly changed the tragic outcome.
