Email: still #1, still a drag

5 December 2008 | Culture, Internet, Marketing, Media, Personal | Comments

[Cross posted to the iMedia blogs.]

Maybe it’s just because at 40 I’ve hit middle age, have two kids and can’t stay awake all night catching up on email anymore, but I was surprised to see that email is still the #1 internet activity by a longshot in data just released by Mediamark. You can see a PDF of the data here, which shows that at 74.2%email has a 28.2% advantage over the #2 activity, reading the news online (46.0%).

Thinking about it more closely, I don’t know WHY I am surprised by this since data from the Center for the Digital Future says precisely the same thing, but perhaps it is simply because I personally find email overwhelming, as I’ve been writing about for a while now (see this post for a sample).

And I’m not alone: if you do a search on the words “email bankruptcy” you’ll see dozens of links dating back to 2006. Joseph Carrabis had a nice post on it in 2007. People are overwhelmed by how much email they receive on a day and how much it gets in the way of other work. Add IM, Facebook, and even more short-attention-span media like Twitter and it’s amazing that we get anything done at all.

I think about declaring email bankruptcy every single day, but how long until I’m in the same situation once again? Is email bankruptcy like real bankruptcy? Would I have to wait seven years?

I admire people like my friend Simms Jenkins who spend their lives getting companies to use email marketing in legal, appropriate and profitable ways. The problem with email marketing is that it’s far easier to do the wrong thing than it is to do that right thing.

A cousin of mine added me to the distribution list for an investment group he runs and I nearly stroked out, sending him a carefully detailed email about how I hope he was only adding blood relatives to this list because anything else was illegal. His response? “Cuz, it’s only you, and that’s the last email I’ll send you.” When my cousin does it, no big deal. When a major corporation does it? Different story.

One day the government will name an Email Tsar whose job it is to protect the email environment from clutter, who will be accountable for the totality of email rather than just the emails that one company sends. We might see armed incursions on offshore server farms that route black hat emails to unsuspecting users struggling to find the relevant needle in a haystack of spam (how’s THAT for a mental image?). We went to war for non-existent weapons of mass destruction: maybe next time we can do something about a real challenge in a virtual environment.