- enterprises were being managed through email, and the medium was not a passive one
- email was transformative, in both good and bad ways
- email first appeared in 1982, which seemed to coincide with a perceived decline in analytical writing
- there was no precedent for the email "killer application"
- Visit functionality for Exchange, Outlook, Gmail; suggest improvements and interview architects and designers for these products
- go beyond what's in the two main books that have been published in the email space
I thought more about it, and realized that email was (just?) a stage in the evolution of written communication. Other significant inflection points in the history of written communication may have been:
- the emergence of literacy (correspendence between ordinary folk)
- postal systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_system
The revised perspective focuses on how written communication has evolved. Social networking phenomena are part of this in the public eye, though in fact they may not represent a significant advances.
A new set of interests, related but different, emerged:
- what it will mean that communications between people are shorter and more elliptical
- alternative ways of managing complexity in the new media
- A rethinking of McLuhan
- Cognitive psychology of discourse thread management - how memory organizes and prioritizes multiple conversations in the new media
- how romance is affected by these new formats
- how management practices are subtlely or more obviously altered by email
- why Twitter/Facebook are just aired-out email with elaborated address books
- what the future holds
- if video phones / video posts become commonplace, how will this transform written communications?
- effects on "literacy" E.g., trends in verbal skills in SAT / GRE
