The Hanover Collaboration

This article is painfully retarded. I mean that literally, like, an article with a learning disability. The lack of technical awareness, the oversimplification, the mealymouthed nostalgia – it’s stunning that an online magazine would publish such a thing, but extremism in defense of the counterintuitive is no vice, right Slate?

Let’s begin with a small technical error: email is as fast as texting. Get two computers, two cell phones, put them side-by-side and try it for yourself (don’t forget to hit “refresh”). In fact, a text message functions socially in the same manner as an email – you intend the recipient to see it and hopefully reply the next time they’re at their device, but there’s no immediate reply pressure. The illusion of greater speed stems from the author’s (admittedly correct) assumption that someone is more likely to have their phone on them than their laptop. Text messages and emails are ignorable communications, unlike phone calls and IMs – though, with the advent of Google Chat, on which people regularly go idle, or forget to take down away messages – ignoring an IM is becoming less gauche.

To further undermine the supposed evidence of email’s demise, I’d like to point out that campus-wide emails don’t get ignored because they’re emails. They get ignored because nobody gives a fuck. After all, did you ever give a campus-wide letter more than a casual glance? The tell-tale ellipsis after an addressee, a suppressed recipient list, or any sender with the name of the institution in its title was a free trip to the Trash in my salad days – and pretty much everyone else I know functioned under the same system. Rest assured, campus-wide Facebook announcements will be met with similar disinterest. New methods of communicating haven’t made anyone less good at picking out junkmail. Just talk to your emailing grandma about the annoyances of spam.

Pressing on, the author utterly overlooks the things at which email remains unrivaled. The supposedly extinct standard is impressively good at sending files between accounts, a fuction texting barely supports, Google Chat ignores completely, and that most IM software is horrible at. Some MP3s I IMed back in high school still haven’t been tracked down by their intended recipients. Email is also good for low priority things that you want to have a record of – shipping confirmations, directions, and the like – especially if you want hard copies. It’s also nice for sending picture messages (since computer screens are generally larger than 4 inches across), and for getting pictures and video footage off of your phone (just text them to your email address, dummy). And no, writing and saving thoughtful conversations doesn’t count as an email plus. People have been creating “sort of diaries” with their saved IM conversations for as long as they’ve been waxing poetic over issues in red and blue.

This brings me to my fourth, and most damning, criticism” all these methods of communication – IM, text, Facebook updates, email – are the same. The author’s concluding image of “a future communications command center” is here, and has been for at least a year. I can text emails, email texts, recieve IMs via text, text back messages to IM, Facebook emails, email Facebook, IM and text Facebook, and Facebook to IM and text. I can even set up email/text/Facebook notifications, so that even if I didn’t have complete cross-communication in my electronic correspondences, I would at least know when messages had been sent.

I know Slate’s bread-and-butter is pushing the envelope on pieces that defy conventional wisdom, but this one is just stupid – Monkey fishing stupid. Email isn’t going anywhere, and everyone who uses a computer on a daily basis knows that. But man – if killing off email meant I’d never have to wade through the insecure, monodimensional prattling of a “nostalgic emailer” ever again – I’d hand you the effing gun.