A recent article in The New Yorker, "Was Email a Mistake?," triggered a conversation around the veracity of email in the Digital Age. The author, computer science professor Cal Newport, discussed this on a recent interview on NPR. This is our response to the question, was email a mistake?
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In this Cast | Was Email a Mistake? A Response
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
Art Gelwicks
Francis Wade
Show Notes | Was Email a Mistake? A Response
Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
Was Email a Mistake?
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Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:23 I am Augusto Pinaud.
Francis Wade 0:24I'm Francis Wade.
Art Gelwicks 0:25 And I'm Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26
And today we are going to be discussing email. And this is a topic that is perennial, but more importantly, Cal Newport, Professor Newport. he's a he's a professor of mathematics Computer Science at Georgetown University. And he recently wrote an article in which he discusses his topic was email a mistake. And he brings up several different angles at which he attacks email. And I wanted for us to have a discussion around really what he's talking about, and whether or not that's real, was email truly a mistake. And to start us off, I want us to kind of just take a litmus test just go around. And what was your initial impressions about the article? And where do you stand on your usage of email? are you stopping use of your email? Are you mediating email with other modalities in order to be productive? How are you using email today? Do you believe email was a mistake?
Augusto Pinaud 1:34
I don't think email is a mistake, we may argue that the way we are using email and how it went out of control is a mistake. But it's not the email that will be equivalent to say, well, the fax was a mistake. It wasn't it was just a matter of what happened with email. I think email came in a moment where we were trying, we were in the verge of going global. And it broke, it brought a vehicle that allows to communicate with anybody, regardless where they are on a semi effective way. And dad in combination with other technologies that came at a time as a Blackberry, and people begin saying, Oh, I can really be more quote unquote, effective if I adopt these tools. The problem was, there was not really a solid execution plan, and we just got on the horse and let it run and hopefully turn into a monster, to be honest with you.
Art Gelwicks 2:32
Email is a natural evolution of this back and forth method of communication that we've had for years. I mean, we had pen pals, we had careers, we had pigeons, the concept is no different. It's just faster, and it spreads over a larger area. The challenge and I think a goose is right on this. It's how we use it, not so much the medium itself. So I'm a huge proponent of collaboration technologies, that's my area of expertise. And to be honest with you, a lot of times a lot of the things that collaboration technology, say they're going to replace could be done through just regular email through efficient and effective use of it. So yeah, I wouldn't blame it, I wouldn't say it's a bad thing. It's a highly effective tool, if used properly. And declaring that it is a mistake is a mistake in and of itself.
Francis Wade 3:26
I think it's a bit of both. I've argued with HR professionals that the single they missed the single largest factor cnet's biggest culture change maker, that's happened in our lifetime, which was email that when email was introduced, it was introduced as a technology, but it became a culture changer. So people's behaviors, ways of thinking ways of communicating ways of working together, all changed with respect to the fact that email was no possible. But it didn't happening a coordinated we, it was purely haphazard and purely, basically random. There was no planning. And as a result, on the far end of the email revolution, or the email culture change, we are living at the effect of poor implementation, up and down, I think we could all agree on that. And know that email has become embedded, there appears to be no way out. In other words, there's no easy there's no nice, easy, quick solution to the problems. Email has exacerbated.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:32 And I'll come down on the side of history, which is that email really came out of the 1960s. And the technology itself helped develop what is the modern day Internet, and so not to give you all a lecture on ARPANET and its history. But email itself is an open protocol, it's a protocol that allows a global community that is, we here you're on the planet and those up there on the International Space Station, beyond to be able to communicate without being connected to the same central system. Originally, email was designed in such a way that you both had to be online. So in order for me to send an email to Augusto, Francis or Art, I needed to call you on the phone and say, Hey, are you online, and then and then send that email and you would receive the the email on the other side, quickly, that became a, you know, difficult system, it was kind of like instant messaging, you had to be had to both be synchronously in sync in order to be able to get messages set back and forth. And that obviously didn't make much sense for asynchronous types of communication, which email would be the best board. So the the store and forward model became the standard, that's what we see today, where you send an email, and it sends it off to a server, that server holds that email. And then when the recipient is ready, they're able to retrieve that email from it. And because of mobile technology, and other web based, you know, email, that doesn't seem like it's an issue anymore, but the reality is, is that we have this ability to get email from many different points. You know, you can have your computer, your mobile phone, your tablet, your laptop, whatever. And all of them can receive email from your email server because of the store and forward method. So we have this open communications medium that is available to us today. And that is all based on the forward thinking of the progenitors, which was that we should have an open platform that should be given to the world, so that we're able to all communicate. And I think from that very basis, we can't say that email by itself was a mistake. The idea here, going back to what art was saying, you know, the idea here is that we need to have some way to be able to communicate asynchronously, we have to have some way in order to be able to not have an arbiter of our of our communications, just from a democratic perspective. You know, think about Facebook being the ultimate arbiter of everything that you ever say, through messenger and WhatsApp and so on so forth, which would you really like that to be the case? and email gives us that ability that gives us that that manifestation in an on the infrastructure level on the on the core internet level, which I think is is very, very powerful and very important. Now, we could talk about principles for using email and how that could potentially have gone awry.
But, you know, the reality is, is that email was was in my opinion, certainly not a mistake. And I think the article title was to get some shocking off to get some publicity kind of focused on it. With a with a shocking title. Let's talk about the idea behind what Professor and report here at Cal Newport is talking about. He is he's talking about this idea that he kind of presents a whole bunch of a slew of different ideas in the article. And I want to just talk specifically about asynchronous communication in today's environment, and whether or not the results of EK names a bunch of studies. And he goes through talking about the impact of different types of technologies. throughout time, what do you feel was the strongest argument that he makes, I'll just, I'll quote this section here. And then that way, we're kind of on the same page. He goes, as email was taking over the modern office researchers in the theory of distributed systems, the sub sub field in which as a computer scientist, I specialize. We're also studying the trade offs between synchronous and asynchronous. As it happens, the conclusion they reached was exactly the opposite of the prevailing consensus, they became convinced that synchrony was superior,
