In praise of good, old-fashioned email
Communication happens instantly now -- so fast that at times we don't even use words. Some of us can remember a simpler time.
My first email address was given to me when I started out as a freshman at the University of Minnesota in the fall of 1994.
That was almost 30 years ago ago — which feels like 100 or maybe 1,000 in tech years — and it means I’m old enough to remember when email felt special.
It’s like sending a letter that gets there instantly, and you don’t even have to use a stamp!
When I would check my inbox once every two days, I would get excited if I had one message.
Maybe it was from my friend who had gone to college several states away, checking in to talk about his marching band parties and getting drunk on wine coolers.
Maybe it was someone taking 1,000 words to talk shit in our fantasy football league – the one that is still going, but which started when we had to tabulate all the results using box scores in the newspaper or on the one computer at our college paper that had the World Wide Web.
It didn’t matter. It was a thrill to get any email.
Even writing this down feels like the modern equivalent of my grandmother talking about growing up in a rural house without running water.
Gather around the fire, kids, and let me tell you about a time before high-speed internet, smart phones and instant messaging.
My experience and age made me uniquely qualified to feel a profound sense of disgust recently upon seeing a prompt from the email provider I use at work, Microsoft Outlook:
Would you like to learn how to reply to this email with an emoji?
No! Hell no!
Give email some respect, I thought, becoming outraged (to nobody in particular).
Go ahead and distill all other electronic communication. I’ll tap the like button. I’ll slap an emoji on a Slack message seven days a week. I’ll hold down your text message just to put a thumbs up on it, letting you know that the conversation has come to a conclusion.
It’s the very least I can do.
But don’t bring this passive shorthand to email.
Would you like to learn how to replace the collective work of Vincent van Gogh with a meme of a dog sniffing its own butt?
Some might say I’m irrationally upset about this. But maybe if we follow the journey of email — and our/my relationship with it — over the last 30 years we can understand why this feels so personal.
At least as I remember it — is this how you remember it, too? — here is how email has evolved in the last three decades:
From roughly the mid-90s through around 2000, it was a useful novelty — an electronic version of letter-writing, great for long correspondence and sometimes short as well. It was exciting to get an email, and it wasn’t weird to write book chapter length responses back and forth.
Then for another five or seven years after that, into the mid-to-late-2000s, there was a feeling of: “Hey, I’m starting to get a lot of emails.” You might have had multiple addresses (though I don’t ever remember having an AOL account, even if those CDs offering free Internet use made great coasters).
People were starting to find me and send me emails, even if I didn’t know them. This was particularly true as I started writing more at the Star Tribune. One story I did about a squabble between parents and high school coaches during this time generated hundreds of emails to me. That was an eye-opener. It was a way for voices to be heard.
From then until maybe 2012, it felt like the marketing folks started to figure out email. The volume was overwhelming at times, but thanks to a trusty Blackberry (RIP) and later the first iPhone, you and I could check our emails at all hours of the day and not just when we were in front of a computer.
I also discovered the efficiency of email during this era. Sending emails to five people was much quicker and less frustrating than making phone calls. And I could do other stuff while waiting for the responses to roll in.
But there wasn’t as much time for long emails and letter writing any more. Spend an hour on an email? In this economy?
And from then until 2019, it was more of the same — but with more scams thrown in. And social media was making its big rise. Almost everyone had a smart phone and was texting more or using messaging apps.
Email was just one of about six ways for someone to get ahold of us quickly and electronically. It was not really special any more, unless some rube hit reply-all and got roasted — like I did one time after saying “lubby” to my wife on an e-mail (our word for love you) and unwittingly sending it to not just her but also a bunch of her co-workers.
And then 2020 came. It was the rise of Slack and video meetings (thanks, COVID). Rapid-fire messages replaced taps on the shoulder or questions across the office. Everything became a Google Meet or a Zoom, until people started to get screen fatigue. “This meeting could have been an email” entered the chat. Outside of work, everyone who was already very online was even more so. You sent an email? What are you 80? I needed that immediately, not in 30 minutes.
And now? I feel like email is starting to come full circle. It inching back to being a charming novelty that serves a newly defined purpose.
Because all the rapid-fire stuff happens other places — Slack or another message app at the office, text or group chat with friends — there are no more overwhelming 57-message email chains.
If you send an email, it might be longer now than it was 10 or 15 years ago, but not as long as it was 30 years ago. Also when you send an email now you are signaling: This is important. I have put more than 37 seconds of thought into it. I might even start with a greeting, an ending and use full-on capitalization and punctuation in the middle. I’m a dignified sender and I respect you, the recipient.
But when you send an email now you are also saying: I don’t need an answer immediately. Email used to have urgency, but 1) We have adapted to a new pace where the old urgency feels slow and 2) As mentioned, the truly urgent stuff has been offloaded to different methods.
You might circle back to an email in a few hours. Maybe even a few days. Unless there is a stated timeline for a response, this is OK in the new email etiquette.
And yes, the brands have continued to find us on email. But those are often nicely sorted into a different category for quick mass deletion. Your inbox will get flooded, but managing it tends to be faster.
You curate your experience, choosing to open only the important stuff (like, obviously, new posts at The Friscalating Dusklight. Open those often so they don’t wind up in your junk folder).
It can be a true pleasure, again, to send and receive a good, old-fashioned email.
And no, I would never reply to one of yours with an emoji.