New and improved technology is always on the horizon. However, when the downsides of technology are realized innovation is sparked. Email is still a giant leap from interoffice mail. Email is also loaded with spam and junk mail we must sort through to get to what really matters. Documents or photos are often attached, taking more time to download which can delay new emails from being received. We see a subject line and perhaps a preview of the message but then must click to read it in its entirety. Depending on what device we use to access our email, we may be required to log in and wait for messages to download. We have all suffered from email overload.Įmail also takes time. Many end up in the deleted bin, junk file, or worse, continue to overload our inboxes as “unread messages” that constantly remind us of how far behind we are. It can be challenging for most of us to read all of them. Our inboxes are flooded daily with messages from virtually every acquaintance we may have. This leads to another huge problem with email – too much of it. Even though email has been used for forty years, some people are still unfamiliar with email etiquette, namely replying only to the original sender of the email instead of replying to “all” in a distribution list. Mass emails are often filtered as spam and may never be received. This is a fantastic benefit of email but it also has its drawbacks. We can custom build a list of email addresses to specify a particular group we want to send our message to. Email was not only a more viable option that was quickly adopted, it negated the need for those envelopes altogether.Įmail has also been a relatively new way to reach a large number of people via mass distribution lists. At the time, however, we thought it was a good system for communicating and exchanging documents with coworkers in different locations. We can laugh at the inefficiency of it all now because we have something infinitely more rational with which to compare it. Mail sorters in those locations would file the envelopes into employee mailboxes or hand-deliver them if you were lucky. The envelope would go into a bin and a few times a day, perhaps, a carrier would collect the bin and deliver the envelope to the intended office locations. ![]() Remember interpersonal mail? If you needed to send a document to a coworker in a different location, you would put the document into a large folder, wrap a string around a cardboard disk to seal the envelope, then write the recipient’s name and location on one of the many lines printed on both front and back of the envelope. ![]() We can hardly recall a time without computers and email or how we ever accomplished much of anything without them. Technology Is Driving Communication ChannelsĮmail has completely transformed how we communicate in our personal lives, but even more so in our workplaces. In fewer than fifty years since its inception, there are estimated to be 2.5 billion email users worldwide today. Since its humble beginnings, email has become a mainstay for one-third of humans on earth. It was nearly one hundred years later until anyone made any real strides in communication and that came in 1972 when the first email was sent by Ray Tomlinson. Samuel Morse invented the first electric telegraph in 1837. Alexander Graham Bell leveraged that technology to extend the capability to voice calls when he invented the telephone in 1876. Instantaneous communication was thus born. Then the printing press was invented by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440 which enabled mass messaging for the first time.Īs people began to better understand the science of electricity and how it could be transferred from one location to another, inventors experimented with the possibility that the same principle might be applied to communication. Messages and information used to travel from person to person via messengers on horseback, taking weeks to months to deliver. If we focus on just a single aspect of this technology, namely communication, we can see just how far we have come.
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