The title says it all Give Up Email Altogether
Read and heed.
Category: General (Page 4 of 135)
As folks getting my announcements on Facebook know, I was a speaker in the Tea at Two series at UNC’s Ackland Art Museum last Thursday. We were celebrating and adding a bit to the More Love: Art, Politics, and Sharing since the 1990s show at the museum.

Here’s how the program was described:
“The Work of Art, Technology, and Love in the Age of Digital Reproduction”
What do light-weight, long-lasting batteries, Match.com, 4chan, Kittehz, SnapChat, Skype, Open Source software, Wikileaks and texting have to do with love and art? They put very contemporary twists on Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and on More Love’s subtitle: “Art, Politics, and Sharing since the 1990s.”
In the spirit of the description and in the spirit of the works in the show, I first began my talk weeks before by creating a conversation on the Facebook event page for the talk. First I collected as many versions of Bert Berns’ “Tell Him” from YouTube. There are easily 30 or more versions of this song done since the first recording by Johnny Thunder in 1962 and the more famous cover by the Exciters that same year. I love the beginning, the lead in and the first line “I know something about love.” The song has been covered by the Mod singer Billie Davis in the UK, Kenny Loggins in the US, Alma Cogan in several languages, by the glam rock bands Hello and Glitter Band, as Northern Soul by Dean Parrish, by the cast of Glee, incorporated into a musical “Return to the Forbidden Planet,” and parodied on Saturday Night Live.
I made a YouTube list of 34 of these.
Along the way, I managed to pick up the idea of inviting people to join the talk via Google+ HangOut. Part of this idea came from a conversation with Mark Katz who was expressing his regrets that he would be in Venice on the day of the talk. Mark said something like “I’ll be in the City of Love tho.” It struck me that there are several Cities of Love — San Francisco especially the Haight, Philadelphia, Paris and to some degree Boston (where couples of all genders may marry). I arranged a HangOut with Bebo White who lives in the Haight, Lorraine Richards who is on the faculty of Drexel in Philadelphia, Courtney Pulitzer who lives in Paris, and Edwin Huff in Boston.
One of the interesting side effects of this Hangout is that while I know Ed, Courtney, Lori and Bebo none of them knew any of the others. Each was from some different time of my own life. Still we all played together well.
Part of the idea for the Hangout was to bring Citizens of Cities of Love into the museum by using common consumer technology, but another part was to mirror and draw attention to Emily Jacir’s piece “Where We Come From.” Jacir solicites and performs small acts of remembrance and love in Israel on behalf of Palestinians who are forbidden to return to the places of their birth. Our aim was not so charged. Each Citizen offered to perform some small task for some one attending the talk. But as love should be bidirectional, the person requesting was asked by the Citizen to perform some small act on behalf of the Citizen.

Bebo will be documenting a visit to Spike, a coffee house in the Castro where Michael Williams’ friend Austin Miller is a barrista. Michael in turn will be recreating a human pyramid that Bebo and his friends created at UNC during the 1967 Human Be-in. Bebo also took us on a stroll thru the Haight using his phone camera including an interview with a modern flower girl.
Edwin showed us the spring snow outside his window. He was asked by Iris Tillman Hill to run out and toss a snowball. Ed grabbed his phone and took us out while he did just that. Iris was only asked to enjoy the warm sunshine on Ed’s behalf.
Lori, who introduced herself by describing the complex relationship between Philly and sk8erz in the Love Park (a great story worth reading), was asked to visit the successful skateboard park under the Interstate in FDR Park by Jeff Shear. Jeff will visit Carrburritos for Lori.
French PhD student, Rox Ane, asked Courtney to attend a Paris Saint-Germain soccer/football game. UNC stand out Tobin Heath is signed to PSG for 6 months. Ideally, Courtney will get a photo of Tobin Heath in PSG uniform. Rox Ane will feast on a plate of Allen and Son BBQ as Courtney’s proxy.
Reflecting Frances Stark’s “My Best Thing” which uses Xtranormal characters to enact a sexually charged internet chat, I took to Xtranormal to present instead four quotes/discussions on technological determinism by Paul LaFargue, Marshall McLuhan, me and Larry Page. I took the Dude as my proxy and our guide.
Additionally, I did a short presentation on Walter Benjamin using Prezi which included a video explaining part of his “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) made by Warren Hedges. Also included in the presentation is a heart shaped word cloud I created in Tagxedo.
As much as time allowed, I spoke about the timeline for the Technologies for Hooking Up from Minitel to SnapChat that I created with Tiki-toki.
Thanks to the Ackland and especially to Amanda Hughes and Allison Portnow for making this possible. Amanda helped document expressions of love by the Citizens who in return are at this moment receiving prisms as tokens of love from Yoko Ono as part of her “Time to Tell Your Love” piece.
During questions someone asked more about Benjamin’s ideas. I referred them to John Berger’s 1972 BBC series “Ways of Seeing” Particularly the first episode. Here it is:
John Berger / Ways of Seeing , Episode 1 (1972) from shihlun on Vimeo.
Four things ibiblian and/or Jonesian:
- Folkstreams.net, an ibiblio-hosted project, got a very good mention on the most read blog, boingboing.net
- I’m speaking at the RTP Association of Information Technology Professionals on Thursday Jan 10 on a panel titled “Strictly Social – How do you connect? Cutting Edge Communication for the Future.”
- I’m speaking at the Ackland Art Museum during the More Love: Art, Politics, and Sharing since the 1990s exhibit showing on “The Work of Art, Technology, and Love in the Age of Digital Reproduction” on March 20 at 2 pm in the Tea at Two series
- ibiblio got some love from the Paleofuture at the Smithsonian as one of the Fun Places on the Internet (1995) for the Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibit.(still in 1995 shape)
In June 2005, we visited Chicago and Wired’s NextFest where we met (and I blogged about) the Philip K Dick Android:
Our visit with Philip K Dick
Words of Philip K. Dick
But in January 2006, Dick went missing. Missing: Philip K. Dick Android
Now David Dufty has written about book about the stories behind the PKD Android: “How to Build an Android: The True Story of Philip K. Dick’s Robotic Resurrection” which draws in very small part on those post and include at bit of the bit about PKDA’s words.
Nice to have been a very very small part of that.
Official PKDA site: http://www.pkdandroid.org/
We’ve had a busy past few months from end of semester to a summer seminar in London followed by a trip around the Balkans: Croatia > Serbia > Istanbul > Bulgaria > Serbia. It’s time to do a little catch up on the state of #noemail.
* Whilst in London, we met up with pioneer #noemail er Luis Suarez aka @elsua. Besides visiting his favorite dim sum shop, Luis offered some insight into his first steps away from email.
Luis realized that while email was touted as a way to increase cooperation and comradely interactions that it was largely being used as a way to CC higher ups on discussions in ways that actually put a damper on cooperation and decrease trusted interactions — and of course filled up everyone’s mailboxes with unnecessary reports and discussions. Team members spent more time looking over their shoulders than acting like a team as managers were flooded with with chitchat. No one was winning and most people were frustrated by the overload.
* I offered a couple of my own insights — later tweeted into the #noemail stream:
- When the Buddha said you should avoid attachments, I’m sure he was referring to email and PDFs
- Email is like a bunch of squirrels. Cute & amusing at first then timewasting, destructive, overmultiplying, & finally *evil*
Friends have been keeping me up on new #noemail articles:
* Joe Bob Hester sends: How useless is email? Two new studies weigh in http://gigaom.com/collaboration/how-useless-is-email-two-new-studies-weigh-in/ which leads us to a GigaOM piece what plays down the kind of gossip and small talk that builds social bonding. Yes there is a lot of that in email, but there it’s annoying and almost not work the cost. Unlike, say, the News Feed on Facebook or a Tweet stream both of which are designed, well-designed, for skimming and sharing in a small talk and social way. What in email is weighed toward being a time sink are positives in more social environments.
* Paul Valach alerts us to a new Pew Internet report: Teens love texting and social networks but ignore e-mail http://pewinternet.org/Commentary/2012/April/Pew-Internet-Teens.aspx
This builds on reports and studies referenced earlier on this blog and by Pew itself. Amongst the interesting numbers are:
35% of all teens socialize with others in person outside of school on a daily basis.
29% of all teens exchange messages daily through social network sites.
22% of teens use instant messaging daily to talk to others.
19% of teens talk on landlines with people in their lives daily.
6% of teens exchange email daily.
Teens would rather use a land line than send email!
But Texting is the dominant daily teen communication channel. “Texting dominates teens’ general communication choices. Overall, 75% of all teens text, and 63% say that they use text to communicate with others every day.”
* Don Sizemore tells us of the need to redesign email using a “new protocol [that] should be a todo list” in a ReTweet from @hackernewsbot on Replacing Email – http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4228402. I think the hackers miss the point. There are a lot of communications protocol and even print drivers that we’ve dropped and reconceived over the years. The whole concept of email should be dropped and reinvented.
* Stacey Devine was the first to alert me to this New York Times article “Disruptions: Life’sToo Short for So Much E-Mail” by Nick Bilton http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/life%E2%80%99s-too-short-for-so-much-e-mail/. Nick notes most of the same points raised in this blog about email — and he even comes to similar conclusions:
Since technology hasn’t solved the problem it has created with e-mail, it looks as if some younger people might come up with their own answer — not to use e-mail at all.
So I’m taking a cue from them.
I’ll look at my e-mail as it comes in. Maybe I’ll respond with a text, Google Chat, Twitter or Facebook message. But chances are, as with many messages sent via Facebook or Twitter, I won’t need to respond at all
UnifiedInBox lets us know of Rachel Woodlock’s post on “Experimenting with managing email overload (or how to ease into #noemail)” which includes disposable customized email addresses for mailing lists aka bizSpam and discouraging .vacation messages and autoresponders. http://www.rachelwoodlock.com/2012/06/experimenting-with-managing-email-overload-or-how-to-ease-into-noemail/ Good ideas and suggestions here from Rachel.
* Luis Suarez and Chris Brogan and others like John Cox’s notes on his “Vacation from Email” http://associationnavigator.com/2012/07/02/take-a-vacation-from-email/ which is really an essay on work life balance. Log off and live. Nice work if you can get it.
* Beth McNichol of the Carolina Alumni Review did a bang up job writing on a tough subject – me — in “Geek Poet Strikes Back” http://www.carolinaalumnireview.com/carolinaalumnireview/20120506/?pg=18#pg18. Lots of my person story as relates to #noemail there. Recommended.
[more to be added as I catch up]
The new digital divide By Joel Achenbach in Washington Post
Yammer as a Time Inc Game Changer
Here are the benefits to scrap the e-mail in ComputerWorld.DK [Danish – use Google Translate or Chrome]
Starting with the past, Washington Post got some hoax busting advice from email historians that resulted in a long but not quite satisfying article with some very good links to orthodox and substantiated email histories including a section on email from Dave Crocker’s Living Internet and Tom Van Vleck’s entry that credits Noel Morris as Tom’s partner in electronic mail creation starting in 1965 (and noted by Noel’s brother film-maker Earl as discussed earlier on this blog). Success has many fathers, but Tom and Noel are clearly the first to implement a mail program.
Meanwhile Megan Garber writing in The Atlantic discovers what I (and many others) have been claiming right along, “‘The Future of Email’ … Looks a Lot Like Twitter”. What she discovers is:
Fluent, a new service that integrates with Gmail (and eventually, its creators say, with other email platforms) to deliver messages in the flowing fashion of a social media feed. The service, built by a team of former Google developers — the guys responsible for Wave, but don’t hold that against them — converts Gmail’s grids into a message-sharing service that’s more dynamic and fluid than any kind of letter-writing has been before, giving way to an inbox that’s not a box at all so much as a Twitter-like feed of information.
I think I’ve mentioned earlier that Wave was a good idea executed terribly from a social point of view (to say the least). Nonetheless I found it useful as it combined many of my styles of communicating, integrated many of the sites and environments that I used to communicate and allowed me to “slice and dice” the various threads and conversations.
I’m no longer interested in how to improve email or it’s best current implementation – Gmail — but if I were I’d be giving Fluent.io a test drive.
Steve Gillmor of Gillmor Gang writes in TechCrunch about “Remembering Email” which is much like remembering the magic of Top 40 Radio or maybe the first clear FM stations. Steve notes that notifications have taken over his attention and ours, but even more the attention of our kids.
Readers of this blog won’t be surprised by this. Short, fast, highly interactive, mobile. That’s the future of messaging. And that ain’t email. And in case, you haven’t noticed that ain’t even voice anymore. Kids text more than voice and more than email. Many of us older folks do as well. The trend lines are set and the practices of business are changing (again see this blog).
Email puts knowledge in siloed inboxes; social (as Luis Suarez has been saying) makes knowledge more open, additive and makes us all richer. The business case, at least internally, is clear.
Steve notices that email serves most often as the default way to notify us of social updates. But, as he also notices, the new robust iOS notifications do a much better job. Those changes sent many folks running to shut off email notifications and get the notification clutter out of the inbox and on the palm top where they are Short, fast, highly interactive, mobile
Steve has additional observations about authority, command and control, sharing, and even the privacy of direct messages.
All good. Email contains the seeds of its own destruction. “The reason email will disappear is because it is the single most effective tool for moving to social.” Once that bridge is effectively crossed, we’ll burn it behind us.
A tribute to Luis Suarez (aka @elsua) in the form of a Dutch/English language site — Moving/Collaborating/Sharing/Connecting/Thinking/Helping/Innovating/Working/Living Outside the Inbox — from IBM Netherlands. Includes the Prezi from my talk at Duke last month “#noemail – Why you could/should/must use better ways of communicating than email” and this interview with Luis:
Great, if a bit noisy, hall interview with Luis Suarez at Jamcamp yesterday. He is down to three social networks: Twitter, Google Plus and IBM Connections (for work) –no Facebook (because he dislikes the Terms of Service).
Good insights. Including how to stay in contact with your clients without email.
Just back from giving a talk and having a talk with the folks at Duke University who do Web and Communications work there. The subject? Productivity in the form of #noemail
Here’s the Prezi:
A calendar page dated Wednesday August 3 showed up in my atom-based faculty mailbox today from my ever alert colleague, Cal Lee.
Angela: Um. Do you not answer e-mails anymore? Because I have e-mailed you four times asking you to come to my desk.
Phyllis: Honey, if I don’t have time to answer an e-mail, I definitely don’t have time to walk over to your desk.
A little of what I learned about #noemail so far.
- Learn from others. Luis Suarez of In Living A World Without Email was a inspiration and eventually a friend. His posts and his four years at IBM without email helped me think about how to appy his experiences to my own experiment. Donald Knuth is always an inspiration, but his experience of abandoning email entirely was less useful to me. A European group called , “We Quit Email” while pretty quiet since its conception and mostly in Dutch, added an additional perspective.
- It’s a great idea to start telling folks early about your plans to go #noemail. I started several months in advance talking to my family, my Deans and my colleagues about my plans. I also chatted some about the idea to my current (at the time) students.
I started with an auto-responder/vacation/away message one month in advance of going #noemail telling folks about my plans and offering many various alternatives — perhaps too many and too various — and offering to accept suggestions of additional alternatives.
- Some people deserve and should get a more tailored explanation and warning. I specifically contacted the students who has signed up for our fall class — also early on.
- Make some public announcements via the alternatives. I didn’t make a YouTube video, but I did make early announcements on Twitter, Facebook, Quora, Diaspora, LinkedIn and on this blog. Later on, I did some lengthy interviews with OpenSource.com and with ReeseNews.org.
- Alternatives can and should be flexible, changeable and even in some cases abandoned. When I started #noemail, Google Plus wasn’t announced. I added that service as an alternative soon after the announcement. I’ll likely drop a few of the alternatives that have yet to be used by anyone to contact me
- Do monitor the alternatives that you’ve suggested heavily at least for the first few weeks. People need to know that you are serious about the alternatives; not just abandoning all communication with them.
- Browers tabs are your friend. I created one browser instance, in my case Chrome, with a tab for each of the alternatives that I had suggested in my Away message. I kept the browser minimized for most of the day to reduce my distractions.
- I looked for some good alternatives for Listserv reading and rediscovered RSS. Most Listservs support reading by RSS feeds which are much better organized and much better for reading than having a ton of messages dumped into my inbox — even with filters and folders and the like. Unfortunately Mailman, a favorite Open Source listserving option, doesn’t support RSS in any easy way. Lyris, currently used by UNC, does but not in a very easy to understand way (I blogged about how to get that to work below).
Some lists are archived on blogs or other sites that have their own RSS feeds.
- Trouble tickets and customer services are better dealt with by online forms or services like GetSatisfaction. I plan to do a blog post on this in the future. We’ve not used email for trouble tickets at ibiblio for several years nor do many others. Spam is only part of the problem. Applying some structure to trouble tickets helps them be solved more quickly and effectively. Solving the problems openly ala GetSatisfaction increases satisfaction.
- Use OpenID, GoogleID, Facebook and/or Twitter to join new sites. Email is often required to join a site, make an order etc, but these alternatives are offered by most that I’ve dealt with since going #noemail and they work great. They certainly reduced my cognitive load for handling ids and passwords. Confirmations and resulting announcements from sites really fill up my inbox even though I work hard to turn off those options and/or opt out, like zombies they keep coming. #noemail fixes that problem nicely.
- Phones are fine. So is Face-to-Face. Some people, particularly those who have a serious and real difficulty, really need to have a meeting over coffee, in the office or at least a phone call. Our email instinct is often to try to hash things out in asynchronous messages. IMs and/or video conferences are better than email, but when folks are anxious or passionate or aggrieved the more open, personal and interactive you can be the better.
Keep in mind that most studies show that casual calls, sales offers and chitchat while important are bigger timesinks than even email.
- The most resistant demographic to #noemail are those people between 50 and 65 years old. Not everyone between 50 and 65, but you’ll find many of them. They may need other alternatives — see phone and Face-to-Face.
- The most vocally resisting group are, unsurprisingly, those who make a living directly or indirectly via email. Those who run a business dealing with mailing management, advising folks about email newsletters, managing contacts, managing email services, and certain systems administrators who are responsible for email and messaging. I’m in sympathy with many of these folks as I’d been the postmaster for UNC for many years (see posts below). But spurious claims about the superior security and control offered email undercut their objections drastically. The argument isn’t really about technology, but about emotion. As Upton Sinclair once observed, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Kinda covers the main point, especially the title: Is email the new “snail mail?”
Nick Mehta writing in Mashable blames your overflowing email inbox and your desire to check in on it on — YOU! Yes, you loser, you are just too lonely, vain, anxious, and self-deceiving. Nick assumes somehow if you are social, self-effacing, calmly unparanoid and have a clear self-perception — tada! — your email problems will be solved.
Note to Nick: email comes to your inbox from somewhere other than yourself. Mostly not even from people, as I’ve seen in the past weeks are people are redirected to other more sane means of communications, but from various automatic mailings, alerts, confirmations, and the like. No psychological changes on your part will have much impact on the amount of email you receive. You may change your reading and responding habits, but there will be email as sure as the sun rises in the east.
Yes, I’m ranting this time and I hope uncharacteristically. I admit I’ve been infected with a rant-virus after having read the rants posing as comments following the WRAL interview. ;->
I have however read not only Nick’s article but also the ongoing Google+ discussion of that article lead by Luis Suarez. I invite you to join Luis and others in a very civil discussion of behaviors and email.
The bigger question looms: Can normative email behaviors of humans and of machines acting on behalf of humans be changed by charters, rules or by your own behaviors?
One of the many great things that David Christopher brought to my attention is this video on social media for business done by Red Sky Vision of UK which begins with the premise: “There is disconnect between how immersed and digitally connected employees are outside of the workplace, and how their internal communications are being delivered. On the ground, employees are still posting printed communications on the water cooler when they can be engaged, led and informed via the latest digital channel.”.
“Technology has somehow skipped the organization.” More deeply it’s about taking social to the C-Suite (as the Brits call the housing for the CxO level execs). It’s a convincing piece of work, beautiful and well-produced. Part a pitch for and to effective Internal Communicators, part a backhanded compliment to services like Yammer.
Social Media @ Work from Red Sky Vision on Vimeo.
At about 12 minutes in: “By 2013, we will not be doing email in this organization anymore; we’ll be doing all of this with social networks.”
Brian Shrader of WRAL shot some footage for a #noemail story a few weeks back. He had the story ready before Google Plus was announced, so it may seem a little dated instead of forward looking. Nonetheless he did a great job including digging up some ancient email footage which some old time computer geeks will appreciate. Last night the story ran on the 6 pm news as “UNC professor tries to go email free”.
At PC World, Mike Elgan writes about “How Google+ Ends Social Networking Fatigue.” The money quote for me is: “Google+ is the first email replacement I’ve ever seen that’s actually better than email.” I completely agree. Mike also points back to his 2010 Computer World article, “How to kill e-mail (before it kills you)” which suggests doing a lot of what I started doing with the #noemail project. (Thanks to Shannon Turlington for the alert on this good article).
David Christopher started even earlier. In 2008, David predicted the dead of email by 2018 at Stop!ThinkSocial. He reminds us of this as he revisits that post this past week in “The Death Of Email By 2018”. David also provides an javascript countdown clock marking the time to email’s end. He writes whistfully: “I spend more time on email than I do with my family.”
Two different former students from two different decades asked recently, “When you started #noemail, did you know that Google was going to release Plus? And how did you know what Plus would do?” Somewhere embedded in the questions is: “Did Google give you some kind of head’s up about Plus?”
My guess was that someone would do something serious to work on messaging and radically reduce the centricity of email. I knew that Facebook and Google both had projects aiming at changing the way social and messaging work. Of course, there were and are several other players working in the same areas. When I started thinking about #noemail seriously last summer just before hearing of Sheryl Sandberg’s talk at the Nielsen conference, I had already seen the software infrastructure in place or ready to be put into place with projects mentioned in this blog in the early parts of the #noemail category and in interviews with OpenSource.com and Reesenews.org. HTML5 + JSON were just too powerful and too promising to anyone interested in integrating activity streams and changing messaging.
Then as you noticed in my classes especially the one in Fall 2009, I’ve been very interested in an emerging literacy powered by vernacular video. Google+ out Skyped Skype on that — leaving out the shared screen and telephone Skype-out parts, but doing a better job of group chats and video sharing.
All this said, Google+ is only in limited field trial and will be changing as the Googlers see how we use it, how we work around the constraints, and how we define the communities and communications uses.
I expect to see something like visible Circles or cooperatively managed Circles or something to help groups communicate better — perhaps an integration of Reader+Groups with a Plus and Circles spin to it. Services to Groups (of the Facebook type rather than the Google Groups type) missing now and was done as a hack early on in Friendster, then in MySpace, then in Facebook, before each added the feature belatedly. Integration and/or a refinement of Google Groups would be one way to get there pretty quickly.
The most pressing question for me is: can we run a class in the fall using Google+ instead of other services? Groups of some sort would help on that a lot.
What Google+ has done for or to me after 5 weeks of #noemail is to answer a lot of the questions that I was trying to raise. I already am enjoying the aspects of Plus enough that I’m not upset about the learning curve and the advent of a new service.
No, I’m not returning to email as a result of Plus. Just to opposite. I may never use email again.
I’m quoted about #noemail at in the Triangle Business Journal. The article by Olivia Barrow talks about “[College and University – pj] Administrators embracing social media to reach out.” As you’ll see, I try to push the idea of interactivity rather than broadcast and of social media over email. No surprised here. I wish I could read the article but it requires a subscription and is mostly behind a paywall.
In case you have a subscription or would like to start one here’s the link to the article.
A friend sends this snipet:
Paul Jones, a UNC journalism professor, says that although many university departments use social media, they do not put a lot of energy into having interactions with their audiences.
“The real question about whether it’s social or not is whether there’s any interaction that happens, either with them or as a result of what you put out,” Jones says.
For Jones, who wrote the code for UNC’s email service [more correctly good parts of good parts of some email services – pj], social media is the next step in the evolution of communication.
“I think university email has been obsolete,” he says. Jones no longer communicates via email. Send him an email, and an automatic reply will point you to 14 different social media sites as ways to get in touch with him.
“Tech has moved on,” he says. “It’s like horses — this is a world better built for cars. This is a world that works much better for other varieties of social interaction.”
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