End of e-mail

Article in NY Times today about the end of e-mail. What's missing is mention of the fact that texting doesn't preserve as a narrative. Sure, the streams stay on the phones until they are deleted by the user (something Tiger should have figured out how to do) and backups probably exist beyond that for a certain length of time with the telcoms. But one of the beauties of e-mail is the elimination of paper, pen, and the postal service from an exchange of letters. For some of us who were letter writers before Al Gore invented the web, this was huge. Not because we didn't have to physically write (since typewriters and the equivalent of "boarding" already existed), but both because a form of composing was now much easier (no white-out needed), and most importantly, responses could be near instant, which was the beginning of the concept of electronic conversation.

So, the fact that this is not instant enough for the Millennials is in itself interesting. But the concept that e-mail is not "conversational" enough,  is to me what is most interesting. True though this is, letters are not truly conversations in the way that oral conversations are. The back and forth is much more extended on each end. The increased magnitude of this data (the words of a letter) requires much greater structure to be intelligible. Letter writing in itself is an art form, and like all art forms requires some discipline to be good. Even if you are able to spontaneously riff, or blow like a great musician, there were still hours of practice prior to that moment to enable it. So if you didn't practice your scales, the bulk of what you emit will be pointless noise anyway and it doesn't matter if it is instantly instant or kind of instant. If you have practiced, and the person you are jamming (texting) with has practiced, a given text stream can be kind of neat and tuneful. Still, it will eventually be lost unless you are obsessive enough to download all your text conversations and preserve them. (This could be dangerous, as Tiger demonstrated). So it gets me back to e-mail. It may be dead when I and all my cohorts are dead, but not until then.