Making Email Slow Again
When I first began to use email in earnest, while a student at MIT in the early 1990s, writing and reading emails had much the same feeling as writing and reading handwritten letters. Â By far the easiest way to write an email was to go to one of a small number of computer clusters on campus and log in to a computer terminal. Â The people I sent email messages to were few and far between, and they also had relatively infrequent access to an email-enabled computer. Â So if you sent an email to someone, you expected that they might not read it and respond for at least a few days, if not much longer. Â All of this encouraged the writing of messages that were relatively long and that provided information that could be quite out of date, much like a handwritten letter.