Into the Ozone
I am a big fan of technology, and especially the communications vehicles like email and text. In fact, since I consider communications the heart of human interaction and evolution, I am especially enamored with how, in my lifetime, our ability to communicate with one another has evolved to the point of her perfection. I only moderate that view with the term “near” since I’m sure that there are some that think we still need to get to a place where we can communicate non-verbally via telepathy, but I have never been a believer that we can realistically aspire to that higher plane. There may exist beings in the universe that can or will be able to have the cognitive ability to do that (trees for instance seem to have some form of fungal-based means through their root structures), but I feel that the human brain as currently evolved has a limit this side of such telepathic abilities. Through the combination of email, texting, IMing, wireless phone and FaceTime, I think we are where some collective vision of Dick Tracy and Arthur Clarke (2001 a Space Odyssey) placed us almost a century ago.
If I had to rank our means of communication, I must admit that I find email to be the most significant. I guess that is because I am less concerned about having a shorthand way of communicating and prefer the length of prose since I am quite comfortable with the written word. I’m even comfortable typing or keyboarding (as we are now supposed to call it). Speaking of that, I probably read thirty years ago about how all the major components of computing had undergone massive upgrades except the fundamental human input function, which was being hidebound by the QWERTY keyboard and digital entry form. We have gone through all the machinations of trying to find an easier way to type and/or easier ways to use verbal translational entry through voice recognition and perhaps except for the occasional use of commands while driving or verbalizing your viewing wishes to your AppleTV remote, we are all pretty much still using our good old QWERTY keyboards…or at least I and most people I know are doing so.
I know my kids and even my wife prefer texting, which still uses the fundamentally same keyboard (perhaps with a bit more thumb involved), but I view that, as I said, as a mere short form of email. FaceTime is still only used when we have time, even though Zoom has become somewhat more ubiquitous as a mechanism for business communications. And as for wireless phone calling, I still use it all the time, but it is clearly slowly moving to the sidelines. They used to say that voice use of bandwidth would get relegated to the vestigial compared to data usage and they are not wrong. I am forever admonishing Kim to just pick up the phone to discuss something with someone we are meeting or organizing to meet, but she clearly prefers to text and says that so-and-so responds better to texts than to a call. I don’t get that because as much as I am comfortable with written communication, I think certain things are simply easier to iterate and resolve by voice. It is sort of combination of the complexity level, the optionality and the two-way iteration that seems to me to make a quick call so much more efficient than a series of texts that may or may not get to the same level of certain confirmation.
For my work these days of teaching and expert witness work, email is essential. I communicate with my class via email and ask that they send me their assignments via email. Almost all of my expert witness information comes and goes via email. And it all reminds me of 1976. That was my first year of work after business school and Mary, my first wife, worked for a company that had spun out of Honeywell and was in what today seems a very archaic business of computer timesharing. Computers were all big then and only a few businesses, much less individuals, could afford one of the beasts. But their capacity had already exceeded their immediate needs, so someone decided that they could sell computer time to help defray the capital cost of the computer, and thus was born the act of timesharing. This company based itself in Rockefeller Center and started by creating a product that they thought would have some market interest. It was called “electronic mail” and they said it would replace paper mail in no time at all. They sold it as a timesharing service to companies that were highly dependent on communications, like banking. I was a young banker and I can attest to the notion that I thought it was an interesting concept with good legs to it. As I recall, Chemical Bank was their big customer at the time. My bank, Bankers Trust Company, was equally interested in the product, but they had decided to build their own, called OIS for Overseas Information Service. It was called that because it had been spearheaded by our International Department which not only needed the communication vehicle, but also was making about 80% of the firms profits at the time. They were busy trying desperately to redeploy all those Petrodollars flowing from the Middle East through London into the global money markets. Their network of foreign correspondent banks was their critically important distribution platform and a quicker communications means rather than the expensive text-like Telex capabilities was in order.
The stories of that little Rockefeller Center company and its foibles in taking the electronic mail product to market are fun memories and would constitute an entire book of stories, but my interest here is more in the medium itself rather than the proprietary process. While that was all going on, those of us at Bankers Trust were busy learning how to use OIS and getting our footing for the future of what would become email and the center of our communications universe. As seems always to be the case, we never fully appreciate what we have until it is lost or perhaps broken and every once in a while email does still get broken.
In addition to a communication medium, email is also a recordation or storage medium. Lawyers are forever warning businessmen for liability purposes that emails never go away. I and most of the world uses Gmail more than any other platform even though it now charges for storage where some others (like the waning AOL) do not. But storage has become such a cheap service that most of us prefer the convenience of paying a few pennies to keep all of our emails in files that are generally woefully under organized. If you are diligent and have lots of attachment documents that you need to access with some regularity, chances are that you have added something like Dropbox to your cloud storage capabilities and those files get a bit more organized by necessity (you actually have to choose where to put things and retrieval ease is a direct function of how well-structured your files are). So email and its brethren like Dropbox are now our collective repository or library of our personal and working lives.
When something goes wrong with retrieval, all hell breaks loose. That is where I stand at the moment for some inexplicable reason. I took in a bunch of student essays over the past week and filed them in IAnnotate, which is my mark-up app of choice. I grade and comment on the papers and then send them back to the students. I do not save them on IAnnotate since I know I have them in the email chain if needed. Or so I thought. For some reason, all of those return emails did not go into my email files like they should have and instead went off into the ozone somewhere. I had to send notes to those students (luckily I knew which to ask since I had my grading sheet marked) and ask for them to send me copies of their graded papers. All but one has done so and yet I know I read and graded his and that it was particularly good. His seems still stuck in the ozone somewhere.
I don’t know how this all impacts my sense of dependence on email and my various app and storage functionalities because I don’t know what went wrong. Did I do something or did the system glitch. I hope it was the former, but will accept the fallibility of the system if need be and recognize that sometimes things just go off into the ozone.