The Hindu Business Line : Mindless mail

Well, here I am, finishing up after a day’s work; work that mainly happens over e-mail and my eyes are aching a little. I wish I could do something apart from the standard exercise and game of looking up from the computer monitor every now and then and watching the television running in the next room; or, even better, just locking my computer and walking over to say hi to a friend. The problem is that the first is boring, and the latter is a luxury.

I wish someone would entertain me meaningfully over my e-mail, not just the mindless forwarding from friends and enemies alike; and at the risk of hurting some, this chain mail carnival just has to stop. One forward is a joke; the same one landing in your inbox a minute later is a joke on you; the same one landing in your inbox 20 times in the next few minutes is just a farce. Why are they forwarding it to the same group of people who just received it along with them? One day, you are going to get your friend’s company’s top-secret business plan along with forty others and he is going to be accused of fuelling insider trading.

But I think we have an insight on what’s happening: People just don’t read their e-mail any more. Think about it: when was the last time you read an e-mail from a friend? Really read. (Of course, e-mails from friends from whom you are expecting job referrals don’t count here.) You see the name, you assume it’s a joke, you press “forward”, add most of the names in your address book and send! And don’t expect people to believe that you are a power user of e-mail unless at least a third of your contacts get treated as “forwards”.

Is there a way out of this? Maybe, and just a step in this direction is the Anymails e-mail visualisation project (http://carohorn.de/anymails/), which assigns creature-icons to your e-mails according to who they are from — from friends, from work, unknown, spam, etc — and the status — read, unread — and the vintage — old, new. Why might this help? We might end up finding the visualisation so interesting that we might actually click, read and digest information instead of being hypnotised by all the text and pressing the panic button labelled “forward”.

N. Nagaraj