Some people seem to think email is dead, but is it? What do you think? Alexis Madrigal from The Atlantic writes about how email is still the best thing on the internet.
There’s the co-founder of Asana, the work software startup. Email has “become a counter-productivity tool,” Justin Rosenstein likes to say.
Slack, the superhot work chat tool, likes to brag that they’ve “saved the world from over 70,000,000 emails” (if you assume that every five Slack messages prevent one email from getting its wings).
And it’s not just entrepreneurs with cloud software to sell. There are the young people, too, especially whatever we call the younger-than-Millennials.
Getting an email address was once a nerdy right of passage for Gen-Xers arriving on college campuses. Now, the kids are waging a war of indifference on poor old email, culling the weak and infirm old-people technology. One American professor maintained that, to his students, “e-mail was as antiquated as the spellings ‘chuse’ and ‘musick’ in the works by Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards.” The vice-chancellor of Exeter University claimed, “There is no point in emailing students any more.” The youth appear to think there are better, faster, more exciting ways to communicate than stupid email.
Yet, despite all the prognosticators predicting it will—choose the violence level of your metaphor—go out of style, be put out to pasture, or taken out back and shot, email grinds on.
You can’t kill email! It’s the cockroach of the Internet, and I mean that as a compliment. This resilience is a good thing.
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