Man, I remember when people used to write letters. The internet just wasn’t a thing on anyone’s radar at the time, except maybe science folk, and personal computers were very uncommon and costly.
There was something special about writing a letter, sometimes bit by bit over days or even weeks. And getting one in the post was exciting. Especially when it was from a relative who might slip a £1 note in there.
I think somewhere I still have a folder of letters from old girlfriends - and they would be old now, one is dead. But you’d keep letters, because they were somehow more personal.
Interestingly, this form of communication had its own viruses - things called chain letters. I got one once, and participated in spreading it. Some just wanted maximum dispersal, others were fraudulent or malicious.
Then home computers and email came along and it was just so much easier. Letters pretty much died out. I only really get them from companies now trying to sell shit. And bills and traffic fines often send them. Fuck knows why traffic fines can’t use email. And my doctors, again - why?
And now email is sinking under the weight of procedurally generated crap and scams. A lot of work related stuff I get is pages of shit generated by AI. I take the view that if they couldn’t be arsed to write it, I can’t be arsed to read it. At best, I’ll get AI to summarise - which is a ridiculous use of all this compute power and its attendant environmental harm. And so, so many ‘click this link’ scams. Makes me wonder if email will soon be superseded by something else.
Google Wave tried to replace email with a come-and-go / bulletin board / long-form chat kind of thing. I’d still like that for occasional things, like organizing holiday get-togethers with the family, but that has been the only time I think about using something like that.
For most personal communication that isn’t biz-to-biz, it’s chat nowadays. And the rooms/teams/channels concept (like IRC) is the main medium for what I used to want Waves to be. At least on Teams, it still supports more than just a “tweet”, and people can come and go on those threads, and depending on the service, you can pin messages, associate a wiki for persistent content, etc.
But all those still require people to be on that particular chat service.
Perhaps that’s the end result for personal and group communication. The format feels pretty right for the job, to me. I just hope it eventually morphs into a federated system like email and Lemmy, as I just don’t imagine everyone agreeing to sign up for yet another chat service every time someone else wants to start a group chat. Then instead of “did you add so-and-so to the group chat”, we’d just pivot the problem to “oh, we were discussing this on the Slack group, but on the Teams group someone else said blah blah…”. Same problem–fragmentation.
Man, I remember when people used to write letters. The internet just wasn’t a thing on anyone’s radar at the time, except maybe science folk, and personal computers were very uncommon and costly.
There was something special about writing a letter, sometimes bit by bit over days or even weeks. And getting one in the post was exciting. Especially when it was from a relative who might slip a £1 note in there.
I think somewhere I still have a folder of letters from old girlfriends - and they would be old now, one is dead. But you’d keep letters, because they were somehow more personal.
Interestingly, this form of communication had its own viruses - things called chain letters. I got one once, and participated in spreading it. Some just wanted maximum dispersal, others were fraudulent or malicious.
Then home computers and email came along and it was just so much easier. Letters pretty much died out. I only really get them from companies now trying to sell shit. And bills and traffic fines often send them. Fuck knows why traffic fines can’t use email. And my doctors, again - why?
And now email is sinking under the weight of procedurally generated crap and scams. A lot of work related stuff I get is pages of shit generated by AI. I take the view that if they couldn’t be arsed to write it, I can’t be arsed to read it. At best, I’ll get AI to summarise - which is a ridiculous use of all this compute power and its attendant environmental harm. And so, so many ‘click this link’ scams. Makes me wonder if email will soon be superseded by something else.
Google Wave tried to replace email with a come-and-go / bulletin board / long-form chat kind of thing. I’d still like that for occasional things, like organizing holiday get-togethers with the family, but that has been the only time I think about using something like that.
For most personal communication that isn’t biz-to-biz, it’s chat nowadays. And the rooms/teams/channels concept (like IRC) is the main medium for what I used to want Waves to be. At least on Teams, it still supports more than just a “tweet”, and people can come and go on those threads, and depending on the service, you can pin messages, associate a wiki for persistent content, etc.
But all those still require people to be on that particular chat service.
Perhaps that’s the end result for personal and group communication. The format feels pretty right for the job, to me. I just hope it eventually morphs into a federated system like email and Lemmy, as I just don’t imagine everyone agreeing to sign up for yet another chat service every time someone else wants to start a group chat. Then instead of “did you add so-and-so to the group chat”, we’d just pivot the problem to “oh, we were discussing this on the Slack group, but on the Teams group someone else said blah blah…”. Same problem–fragmentation.