Email: first critizen of the Internet: July 08, 1996 issue of New Thinking

July 08, 1996 New Thinking:
Email: first citizen of the Internet

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July 08, 1996

Email: first citizen of the Internet

By Gerry McGovern

In all this talk about the wonderful Web, don’t forget that email is the first citizen of the Internet.

The revolution is not in multimedia, not yet. The revolution is in communication and it is email which is the engine.

Everything that we have ever known, done or will do is oiled by communication, and every time we discover a significantly new way to communicate, we have a new revolution.

What is communication?

Communication is a process by which we achieve things which could not be achieved on our own. In earliest societies, communication was done verbally or visually. Then, particularly in areas of commerce, text and numbers came to prominence.

This became so because there was a need for more precision and for records. But with the emergence of text and numbers, people found that they could trade over long distances in a way that was simply not possible before. So, text and numbers not simply met a need, they opened up brand new opportunities.

The phone had a similar effect, enhancing long-distance trade, and also opening up new opportunities. The fax had its own impact. An important thing to understand in all this is that these devices did not simply change the way we communicated, they changed society and created whole new forms of business.

Email will change the world more than the phone did.

Email saves time. In an age where everything is expanding except time, that is a major advantage. The entire email process is much more efficient than a phone in many respects. It brings the greater precision of text to a communication. It is quicker to deliver. No waiting, no engaged tones, no secretary to get past, no voice mail.

It is less demanding. It does not barge in, badgering in high-pitched tones to be picked up. It waits patiently until you decide that you have the time to read it. It is very easy and quick to reply to. It has the same small cost, regardless of distance, and that, of course, is a revolution in itself.

Email can be one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many. With regard to many-to-many, email becomes a foundation upon which the massively parallel society can be built, as it networks many minds to address complex problems.

The future of the Internet will be based more on how email works, than on how the World Wide Web works. Because email comes to you. You have to go to the Web. Email will become more multimedia and the web will becomes more of a library, as well as a net to catch people for email databases.

In the Industrial Age, the nature of goods and their costs of distribution dictated that most of them could not be economically delivered to your door. Almost always you had to go to a shop or store to get your product. The digital age has created many goods which are digital and these can very easily come to your desk.

More and more, the digital age will come to you.

Gerry McGovern

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Email can be one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many.