Its very fashionable among the digital chatterati to knock email (it is in fact a prerequisite for social media experts to recite the "email bad, socmed good" mantra daily), and the Email vs Noo Meedja debate is a hardy perennial in the blogosphere - today's shot comes from
Jessica Vascellaro at the WSJ
We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.
Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don't need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public "status" on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.
Email, you see, is so boringly slow:
Years ago, we were frustrated if it took a few days for a letter to arrive. A couple of years ago, we'd complain about a half-hour delay in getting an email. Today, we gripe about it taking an extra few seconds for a text message to go through. In a few months, we may be complaining that our cellphones aren't automatically able to send messages to friends within a certain distance, letting them know we're nearby. (A number of services already do this.)
Or will we? What has happened is the transaction cost of the message has continually moved from sender (hey, it costs nothing to send so I'll fire away) to the receiver, who now has to deal with the huge increase in data thrown at him or her. To understand the likely evolution, it is helpful to look at some elements of information theory. There are three main principles of Information Theory that are relevant in my view:
Shannon's Law
Shannon's Law states in essence that the channel capacity is bound by the bandwidth of the channel and the signal to noise ratio. In other words, there is a limit to the information that can be processed. In this case, the bandwidth at issue is the bandwidth of the receiver (you) to process what is coming in. There are two elements to this:
- The bigger the firehose, the bigger the receiver's ability to process must be
- The worse the Signal to Noise (S/N) ratio, the more cr*p has to be processed in the firehose to get what is needed.
Signal to Noise Ratio
The S/N ratio is the % of a communication that is useful vs that which is "noise". At some point, as the signal to noise ratio decreases, the utility of the system decreases below a point where it is useful to continue with it. Email suffers badly from this at present, because:
- Low transaction costs increase the number of messages sent
- As the cost of sending information reduces, so the information value of each piece does not have to be as high - so you get a lot of near zero value information.
As you can see, this is not a problem that the new mediums solve - they have, in many cases, even lower transaction costs so the likelihood over time is a poorer, not better S/N ratio. The reason they are not as plagued as email yet is that they just do not have the volumes, because:
Network Effects
In theory, as more people are connected in a network, utility rises. The downside is each extra transaction has a processing cost, and at some point the costs are greater than the utility, which is why the "real" network effect is an S curve, not a hockey stick. This is where email is today, with many hundreds of millions of people connected and the utility declining as people's inboxes continually fill up. There is nothing in the intrinsic design of the latest systems that make them more proof against this effect than email - in fact, as we saw above, it could get worse as each new user is more "noisy" on average than on email due to even lower message transaction costs. Those of us who were around on the textnet in the days of yore will recall how delightful email was when there were so few people on it, and when it wasn't worth spammers getting bundles of addresses and blasting people on it - and will also be watching the spam developments on Twitter with a weary eye. Likewise, the increasing use of "pull" techniques in social media mirrors similar in email groupware. I expect to see Daily Twitter digests ere long......
In other words, these newer mediums' main saving grace currently is simply that there are less people on them. I contend that as their user base increases, the receiver side will have to become more and more sophisticated - so Tweetdeck et al will start to look more and more like an email client in functionality.
As to how people will use them over time, all things being equal, in my view the issue for email vs newer "always on" systems with limited persistence is the tradeoff in personal productivity verses group productivity:
- to shift attention from one task to another, to change mental gears, takes time. What email had in its favour over telephony was that it was asynchronous - ie you got stuff done without interruption, then processed emails in "burst". For certain types of knowledge work this is very useful as it minimises wasted cycles of high value knowledge workers.
- on the other hand, for some activities having the whole group clued in as quickly as possible is the most productive option, as it minimise wasted cycles of a whole group of people by ensuring co-ordination.
In various circumstances one type is more useful than the other, and in my view we will see co-existence of various systems. Incidentally, would observe today that (i) the bulk of users of the social media tools to date tend to have a lower value per unit time than the users of email - they are very typically consumers on their own time - and in corollary (ii) many users of social tools who do have high time value either use it in a "bursty" mode like email or use it more as a broadcast tool.
Jessica ends up with similar observations in fact:
Will the new services save time, or eat up even more of it?
Many of the companies pitching the services insist they will free up people.
Jeff Teper, vice president of Microsoft Corp.'s SharePoint division, which makes software that businesses use to collaborate, says in the past, employees received an email every time the status changed on a project they were working on, which led to hundreds of unnecessary emails a day. Now, thanks to SharePoint and other software that allows companies to direct those updates to flow through centralized sites that employees can check when they need to, those unnecessary emails are out of users' in-boxes.
"People were very dependent on email. They overused it," he says. "Now, people can use the right tool for the right task."
Perhaps. But there's another way to think about all this. You can argue that because we have more ways to send more messages, we spend more time doing it. That may make us more productive, but it may not. We get lured into wasting time, telling our bosses we are looking into something, instead of just doing it, for example. And we will no doubt waste time communicating stuff that isn't meaningful, maybe at the expense of more meaningful communication. Such as, say, talking to somebody in person.
To me this paragraph shows where the real race is between these various systems - in filtering. Right now, social media is mainly filtered via the simple expedient of there being fewer people on it. If it reached email volumes, as it has to to do all the roles email does, then the maximum utility will go to the service with the best filters.
By the way, read the comments - fascinating!
