THE SIGNIFICANCE OF EMAIL AS A REPLACEMENT OF WRITTEN LETTERS IN THE DIGITAL ERA

One estimate suggests that there are now over 1.2 billion, and rising, email users in the world. For those of us within that sixth of the world’s population email is now an everyday medium; part of the everyday routines which have dropped below the level of conscious attention. Yet ‘e-mail’ (electronic mail) developed alongside or within the wider development of the Internet from its origins in more local networks such as ARPANET from the 1970s on. In this sense it was simply a way of writing terse notes or messages in much the same way as people wrote and sent notes or letters to one another with the advantage of much more rapid delivery.

However, as the ownership of networked PCs grew, and email applications became widely available, commercially or as free downloads, the email came to replace the written letter for very large numbers of people. There is more to this than meets the eye (not least for the postal services that still exist worldwide) and it continues to be a useful case study in thinking about the significance of digitality. The conventional letter had specific and valuable characteristics and an important history (and for some people, it still has. Indeed, some of the characterstics of email communication that we discuss below have led to a certain re-evaluation of the ‘letter’). The letter requires physical production, it has to be written or typed, put into an envelope, licked, posted in a special box. It is then subject to the vast enterprise of the post office system in which each house is a physicalised data address.

In addition to these material properties the letter has an important history as a literary and cultural form. Until industrialisation interpersonal communication over distance by writing depended upon the physical transportation of the text by messenger, hand to hand. Public or private news took days or weeks to move from one part of a country, or empire, to another. This pace of transmission had an effect upon the status of the message: the arrival of a letter in pre-industrial society was an ‘occasion’, replete with significance. The commercial and military imperatives of industrialisation and imperialism demanded greater speed and accuracy in person-toperson communications, leading to developments in telegraphy, telephony and the modern postal service. By contrast, we might characterise email in relation to the principles of digitality (like speed, quantity and flexibility). The email process, though not instantaneous, is extremely fast compared to the physical transportation of a letter; so fast, in fact, that it might stand as one of the best examples of the kind of ‘space time compression’ often referred to as typical of a postmoderncommunications environment. Distant locations are brought into the same communicative proximity as the office next door.

Certainly, the email, because it exists only in digital not analogue form, is subject to multiple transformations and uses. Unlike the handwritten letter it can be multiply re-edited during composition, and the recipient can re-edit the original, interpolating comment and response. The email can be sent to individuals or groups, so the email might be written in any number of registers on a private–public scale. Writing an email to your co-workers will demand a different mode of address from writing an email to your extended friends and family network. A one-to-one email will have a different tone from a group email in composing we are constantly negotiating different positions on a private in public scale. This flexibility is enhanced by the possibility of making attachments to the email. These might be anything from another text document to photos, moving image files or music. More or less whatever can be digitised can be attached. Here we see email exemplifying convergenceof previously discrete media forms.

These qualities have led to a massive increase in the quantity of communications information processed via the PC. There is a net increase in communicative actions, a perceived increase in productivity for organisations, and arguably an increase in social and familial communicative traffic (among what we have to remember is still a global minority with domestic online access). At the level of administration and management this use of email represents an intensification of the paper-based form of the memo. However, this increase in traffic creates new problems of data storage and management; the sheer volume of email received by organisational workers creates ‘information overload’. ‘No email days’ have become a feature of corporate life as managers have come to understand that constant message checking is the enemy of concentration (Wakefield, 2007). These changes have a number of qualitative implications. For instance, whereas the postal letter has evolved a whole series of formal codes and conventions in modes of address (inscribed as core topics within British schools’ National Curriculum) the new forms of digital text communication have evolved a whole set of far less formal conventions:
Thoughts tend toward the experiential idea, the quip, the global perspective, the interdisciplinary thesis, the uninhibited, often world that has always been at the centre of media processing. For consumers worldwide, differences of wealth and poverty which underpin their highly differential access to other goods, services and technologies apply equally to digital media. The digital principle does not escape the demands of physics or the economic principles of scarcity.

BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA

BAPRM III - 42686