If I had no access to e-mail for an extended period of time, there would be grievous repercussions for myself, for the senders, and for people I am responsible for. Emails from my boss asking about my last shift would go unopened, leading to an employment review session. Corrections on my homework assignments would be left uncorrected, leading to countless hours of wasted effort spent determining where a nonexistent arithmetic error was made. My committee members would not show up to meetings, because I am unable to get in touch with all of them easily individually. Coming from this approach, email is an essential form of communication, but can easily spiral out of control. "Everything in moderation," my mother always says. By balancing the use of email with personal interactions, we can be sure that our future is not destined to be spent in cubicles, sending emails back and forth between coworkers, friends, and family, and ensure that our ever decreasing social skills remain as rust-free and polished as ever.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
e-Mail: Time Commitment, or Time Saver? -ER
With the ever-increasing digital literacy of our culture, are we losing social literacy? Each day, upon logging into my email interface of choice, GMail, I am bombarded by the plethora of new emails. They come from academic advisors, family, friends, Facebook notifications, and the all-time most hated, colloquially named, 'spam.' Going through these emails often takes upwards of an entire hour. This hour could much better be spent on homework, studying, reviewing the day's lectures, or having live interactions with the people sending the emails. Out of the estimated 50 emails I receive each day, 5 require responses, 10 are left unopened, and 35 are deleted immediately. The 10 emails I leave sitting there, like scraps of paper on a desk, accumulate until suddenly, there are 200 'important' emails sitting on my virtual desk to be sifted through. Despite the hassle of this form of virtual communication, it is essential to stay linked in with the ever accelerating world around us.
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This post has really good personal observations and uses even simple statistics to truly analyze the prompt. It was also good how you introduced spam messages into the picture. We all get them, but when discussing this prompt I have seen that most people left them out of the picture. When talking of email wasting time and all that, these companies that have to manage spam email are also wasting people's time. It's not just interacting with other people, but interacting with bots from websites and other general media, such as Facebook. Like myself, you mentioned that your studies would suffer from a lack of email access, but unlike me you discussed the problems that arise because of your employment. This would definitely be a big problem and result in a much lower level or structure within your job, and could potentially lead to your release.
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ReplyDeleteYou provided many specific examples to support your argument. You clearly made a point that even though most of the e-mails we receive are not terribly important, our daily life will definitely get affected if we didn't have access to e-mails for a long time. I agree with this claim, and made a similar point in my own blog post. We will of course be uninformed of many things and will have harder time keeping in touch with people around us, but I think many of people nowadays overestimate the inconvenience that will be caused by not having access to e-mail.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that in this era of technology, it is important to balance use of e-mails and personal interactions in order to maintain the social skills.