Email incommunicado

Have you noticed how difficult and slow is communication via email these days?

Have spammers killed this dear channel or are we just bad receivers who try to improve our email processing efficiency with tools that are not wired for our communicative behaviors?

We want to be kept in the loop and be communicative by subscribing to lists and CC-ing entire organizations but then we kill the direct channel, the simple email addressed to us by somebody whom we know either because he/she uses a different email address or because the email has been placed in an unimportant folder by the inflexible rules where we can not code “but put it into my inbox if I am the only recipient and I know this person”.

Emailing drops from the list of communications means because the decoding at the receiving end is nolonger working on the information in the body but has been transformed in the business assistant scrutinizing the envelopes coming in for her boss based on her guess and unaware of marketing tricks. Whether I do not have the right email address, the catchy subject or the shortness in expression, there is a high chance my email will not be read and my message will not reach its destination.

Mail, telegram, email, instant messaging, phone, telepresence and transcendence … by abandoning email I need to move now up on the communication scale into options that are more and more intrusive and which may obsolete textual and graphical communication when these are the best means of expressing our thoughts in an objective, persistent, linguistically rich, and hard to repudiate way.

Is there value in saving the email channel or is it already dead business?