The Good , The Bad , and The Ugly

Electronic mail has become the unexciting and mundane electronic communication medium we love to hate. It wasn’t always that way. Hate is a fairly recent emotion. Email has been with us in one form or another since the earliest days of computer networks and bulletin board services. From inauspicious beginnings, it became one of the three “killer apps,” along with Telnet and FTP, that gave the Internet its momentum. Since the early 1980s, the popularity of the Internet and email have surged together. Since the 1970s, email has evolved into the communication tool of choice for information technology academics and professionals. By the 1990s, the popularity and ubiquity of email throughout the rest of academia and high-tech industry, established it as a communications standard within those areas as well. It appears likely that the current wave of online service providers will soon extend this standard to the rest of the network-connected world. As email has evolved, we have come to surprisingly limited consensus regarding the best and worst uses of the technology, and whether it can ever overcome its weaknesses. In this column, I try to summarize what seems to me to be some interesting aspects of email, particularly as it relates to the phenomenon of information overload and some thorny privacy issues.