Ode to the Email

It's not easy being a dinosaur. Although dinosaurs actually had it easier than many of us out there do today. They didn't know that they were already extinct after that asteroid hit. Email users like myself don't have that luxury. We're email dinosaurs. We live in an age of near instantaneous communication. It's a done deal for us and we know it.

A recent incident over at the folks who bring you Gmail only made this all the clearer to me. Approximately 40,000 users of Google's famous mail service woke up to a rude surprise one morning a few months back. When they opened up their inboxes, their inboxes were out. Empty, that is. Nothing, niente, nada. All or their important, less important and not at all so important electronic correspondence had been inexplicably vaporized (you can think asteroid here too, if you want). A server had given up its ghost and the catastrophic loss could only be restored after several days of troublesome and painstaking effort. But the thing that really struck me here was not so much the technical malfunction as the reaction of most of those who were supposedly inconvenienced by it: They didn't seem to care.

To be more exact, those customers under 30 didn't seem to care. People in this age group are doing their communicating other places these days. According to a study done by Nielsen Media Research, America's young people send or receive 3,339 texts a month (that's six per waking hour). And when you add Facebook, Instant Messenger Chat and all the other social network offerings available out there, it quickly becomes obvious that worrying after your emails has landed on the bottom of today's priority list.

Universities have stopped giving new students email accounts. These students don't seem to notice or much care - they just shrug their shoulders, if they show any reaction at all. There used to be something like an emotional connection to having your own email address but that seems to have fallen by the wayside. Now the only thing that might shake young people up would be attempting to take away their cell phones or chat programs. Life, as they know it, would unimaginable without them.

Email has become the equivalent of what the old handwritten letter used to be (I won't even attempt to explain to those under 30 what that was), only with none of its quaint advantages. It is an anachronism, no longer relevant - and the world has a habit of doing away with anachronisms. Yet it wouldn't even be so bad if this apathy were restricted to just the Facebook crowd. Unfortunately, one study has indicated that of the 8 percent total drop in email use in 2010, 12 percent of those moving on belonged to the 45 to 54-year old age group. Talk about not acting your age. How unbecoming is that?

In the old days, when it was a big deal to have an Internet connection at all (an analog one mind you - I won't bother to explain that either), email was absolutely revolutionary. Now that everyone has a DSL Wi-Fi connection, smartphones and seemingly limitless bandwidth, real-time communication is taken for granted. Live chatting or video conferencing has become the next taken for granted technological advancement of everyday life. Why wait (and hope) for someone to open an email you sent them? Why send an email with a link to that cool YouTube video to someone when you can post it directly on your Facebook page instead?

At least office life still provides a refuge for this highly endangered email species - or so I thought up until recently. There seems to be some major rethinking taking place here now too. Some companies have already announced that they plan to renounce this once so essential technology within the coming few years. It seems that management now feels the 5 to 10 hours some employees (and managers) spend per week looking through their inboxes could be used more efficiently doing something else. Other companies like Intel, for instance, have already introduced email-free workdays.

And it is undeniably true that video chats with products like Apple's Facetime or Skype avoid misunderstandings that have notoriously plagued email correspondence in the past. After all, your conversation partner is right there in front of you, live and in color. The popularity of Wikis, an open platform that allows a group of contributors to collaborate on texts together online, is also clearly more efficient than the old-fashioned method of email ping pong. And yet... I like playing email ping pong. But I guess that's just me.

So what's the big deal, you ask? I'll tell you what the big deal is. I don't care that email is a forty-year-old technology long since past its prime. I'm even older and past mine too. And I am also one of the few humans on the planet who doesn't "do" Facebook (yet). I don't send or receive text messages all day long either, never have and never will. I'm old and gray and in the way, in other words. And worse still, I may be nearly alone here but I've decided to stick to my guns. I will go down with this ship. They will have to pry my email client from my cold, dead hands if they want it, whoever they are.

Not that that's any big deal or anything. Or that anybody really cares. I'm an email dinosaur, remember? I'm extinct already.

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Originally from California's Central San Joaquin Valley and washed ashore on the coast of old West Berlin, Charles Larson is a freelance writer well versed in German and German culture. For more info, feel free to visit his website at EnglishPro & Co.