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How many of us have every made a telegraph in our 4th grade science class?  I am still sort of amazed by the thought of clicking in one spot and having the dots and dashes come out a hundred miles away.  At first it probably seemed like some kind of parlour trick; magic.

I think Einstein said:

  I imagine that after 20 years, it (the use of the telegraph) became common knowledge.  Eventually, folks came to expect that it would be there, just like the trains running on time. After many, many years of service, something else came along and now something that once was considered to be a “standard” for communication has fallen out of common usage.  Eventually, the telegraph will complete disappear from the common lexicon of langauage.

Some people are predicting the demise of email, for a variety of reasons.  One reason email may dissappear is SPAM.  By some estimates, more than 75% of all email messages sent are SPAM, and this figure is only going to get worse.  Email also has some shortcomings as a medium.  My boss is always telling me to keep my messages to no longer than what will fit in the box on the screen displaying my message.

So my messages sometimes are sent in packets, like the Burma-Shave signs. Or I use a lot of short hand. Or it takes me a really, really long time to compose something.  If you have read this far, bless you, but you don’t need me to tell you that I am not a writer. 

So another problem with email is that it is so easy to send that proof-reading does not always occur.  At best, we trust the spell-checker to find words that have been shot through by the drive-by typist.  At worst, we send something to 5000 people that has incomprehensible grammar, bizarre twists of phrase, and spell-checker assisted suicide.  Then, if that was not embarrasing enough, we find that the misshapen message has been forwarded to email accounts ad infinitum providing a global audience to our incompetence.

The advances of technology have made it possible for one person to commit as many errors in a moment as it took an individual to create in a lifetime without technological assistance.

The other “Problem” with email, in fact, the main problem with email is that there is WAY TOO MUCH EMAIL!   I used to love getting letters from the post office, especially all of the letters that I got from my grandfather.  These letters were usually written quickly, but contained insights into life, love, success, failure that changed my thinking in radical ways.  When I first started using email (sometime in the late 1980’s), I actually knew the people that I was communicating with, and we had something important to say.  Somewhere along the line, the marketing idiots got hold of the idea and the next thing you know we have to wade through mountains of messages to find anything that is really important.  I doubt I have read an email in the last ten years that really had anything even approaching the level of the short personal messages that my grandfather wrote.  I wonder if email is destroying the future shakespeares?

We have a policy that the “official” means of communication at this institution is email.  I cringe when I think of it.  On the surface, it sounds like a good idea.  Quick, efficient, reliable.  So lacking in the human touch.  I am not a ‘touchy-feely’ type of person, but sometimes I wonder if the “official” means of communication at an institute of higher learning should be something higher, like telepathy, or sign language, or chorals, cantatas, symphonies, loving embraces, comic monologues, rock music, sculpture, dance…iambic pentameter, the tears of a mourning family…the weeping of a forlorn child…anything but the 1984-ish pronouncements that are streamed impersonally to each and every student.

 Our policy reminder…come to our event…you WILL read your email or suffer the consequences and doom that follow…..

One other really big problem with email is that it does not lend itself to very great depths of thought.  It is a telegraphic method of communication..short bursts of staccato taps that demand insistently that we read quickly and reply–quickly!!!  Everything is urgent with email.  We greet each other in the hall with “Did you read my email yet????)  If the response is negative, we are upbraded by the sender, “Why not????” It even comes to the point of having to defend attention to other details of your work life.  We make it a subject of research (?!)  Did the students open the messages?  Did they respond to our survey?  Is it possible that we have something more urgent than your survey?  Email has become a constant droning, whining, squealing sound in the background noise of our lives. If we neglect it for but a short week, it becomes the untended part of the garden, over-run, demanding attention until we have pulled out all the weeds.  It becomes the new parable of wheat and tares; sometimes we refuse to follow the advice of the landlord, and we delete all of the messages, just to get rid of them somehow.

Another problem with email is that something better has not really come along…yet.  This, in a way, is a lot like the problem with dependency upon foreign oil.  The chief component of the problem is hidden…it is not that the oil is foreign….the problem is oil, period.  We will continue to justify global warming, smog, paving over of a nation, destruction of wildlife and habitat, as long as we think there is no other way.  Electric cars actually outsold combustion engine vehicles in this country at one time. At one time, it was not uncommon for farmers to have wind generators. At one time, people actually wrote letters to each other. 

What is the replacment for email?  What other form will communication take?  I think the first thing is to realize that it is not that email needs to be reformed somehow.  It is time to realize that it really is not a replacement for true communication.  The problem is to get back to the tools that my grandfather and his father before him used. 

Trade in your keyboard for a pencil and paper.  Think, think, think……write, write, write.  write some more.  If you have it within you, sing, dance, love, compose.  Smile, tell jokes, be silly, be serious.  Rebel against the official methods by supplanting them with the genuine methods. 

Oh, and be sure to email your friends a link to this blog!