In the new Fast Company Alex Iskold arguesthat email is gradually being overtaken by more immediate and flexible forms of communication, such as Twitter and wikis. He further posits that the need for lengthy emails is decreasing while more frequent updates and memos are becoming more common. Given the ubiquity of email in business, it’s hard to see it disappearing anytime soon. But I agree with Iskold that new formats and tools are opening the door to a weakening in the hegemony of email, and I think these alternatives will become more popular as people begin to tailor their outreach to suit the situation. Email has many advantages, despite its overuse, but I’ve always found it to be a fairly blunt instrument. (On the other hand, I’m old enough to remember when we didn’t have email in the office, so I still see it as an incredible addition to the communication arsenal.) New tools like Twitter, IM, social networks (which allow group updates via text, photo or video) and collaboration tools like wiki allow users to be much more targeted and deliberate about what channel they use to communicate with colleagues or friends. Hopefully that will reduce the lazy overliance on email and increase its effectiveness.
Categories
Blogroll
Category Cloud
Recent Posts
1 comment
Comments feed for this article
July 18, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Davd Duschene
Email will never die, but it must evolve to remain relevant.
As someone who routinely receives 150-200 emails on a given weekday, I can tell you that it’s near impossible to keep up and read everything (thank God for preview panes!). And I’ve heard at least one executive proclaim, “I don’t use email anymore,” during a meeting with his leadership team.
I think there you can apply a law of diminising returns on email: the more a person receives, the less they pay attention. So that means companies and individuals must be sensitive to how and when they use email, especially for sharing important information and time sensitive stuff. If we are not careful, our important emails will get lost in among the announcements our co-workers send about leftover cookies in the kitchen or how the office softball team fared on Tuesday night.