I received a great email from someone recently, apologizing for taking so long to get back to me with an answer to a question I had asked. She stated that the email “got buried” in her inbox.
I can so relate to this! We get hundreds of emails every day at the News- Herald. The majority of them are junk or not relevant to our community. But each and every message has to be perused to make sure it’s not important.
There have been many times when I’ve been set to “trash” a message and at the last moment realized that the text of the email included the name of a local business or individual being recognized—or included a link that led to some exciting news for our readers.
For every 500 or so emails that claim to have a “local” connection, there is one that truly does.
It’s overwhelming at times and sadly, as my friend noted, sometimes things do get buried as new messages push the old ones further and further down the inbox list. I try to reverse the order in which I retrieve my messages occasionally, but that’s risky as then some get missed in the middle.
It used to be said that the number of keys a person carried was a good indicator of how busy his or her life was. Now I think it depends on the number of electronic methods of communications an individual has to deal with.
It’s hard to believe that email, which was relatively new in the 1980s has become such a vital tool in our everyday lives. And it’s hard to believe that what was once cutting edge technology is becoming passé. Now there is Facebook, Facebook private messaging, Messenger, Twitter, blogs to follow, forums to frequent, chatrooms, Skype and Facetime and so much more.
It’s a bit mind-boggling keeping track of it all. Especially when you add in telecommunications—a few decades ago most of us had only two telephone numbers to share with others, work and home. Now with the omnipresent cell phone we all have three and along with it, text messaging.
It wouldn’t be so difficult if everyone was on the same page, but no such luck. I recently wanted to send out a message to a group of friends and found myself typing and then cutting and pasting the same message into a Facebook message, an email and a text.
Keeping track of the preferred method of communication for different friends and colleagues can be complicated. So, I could empathize with the friend who found my email message days after it had been sent. It made me feel better about the many times the same thing has happened to me.
Maybe we’d be better off just writing a letter and dropping it in the mailbox!
Your email inbox is a bit like a Las Vegas roulette machine. You know, you just check it and check it, and every once in a while there’s some juicy little tidbit of reward, like the three quarters that pop down on a one-armed bandit. And that keeps you coming back for more.
Douglas Rushkoff
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