Email, the grandaddy of cyberspace

I love to email, we all love to email – it’s the thing we do in the noughties, right? To me, email is like a soft fuzzy comfort blanket. Take it away and I start stamping my feet and whining like a baby. So I was kinda freaked out to read an email (coo!) from some web guy here that opened the door to a new approach to email. That is, a kinda collaborative web page (like, hey, a blog or a wiki kinda thang) with links to various projects and the opportunity to add comments on those particular projects (see http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/web-focus/) . Simply: no-more-email.  Just web. And wikis. And blogs. And I’m thinking, for chrissakes, no!

There’s something about email that brings out the Virginia Woolf in all of us, allows us to deliver a stream-of-consiousness that is unrestricted by blogs and stuff. I can’t tangibly explain why really. Email? It’s the proverbial chat over the garden fence. Collaborative web pages? It’s like a meeting at work.

Sure, email can get you in trouble. Like that time I forwarded on a joke from a friend to a few people. Thing is, what I failed to delete off the bottom of that joke was a whole conversation about how I snogged a boyf of one of the girls I’d forwarded that email too. Or the time I emailed a colleague while working at a company during my uni days, saying the boss was a perv and was no doubt shagging his PA then pressed ‘print’ instead of ’send’. Yep, you’ve guessed it, it printed out to my boss’s printer. Or the time when I referred to the person who we were buying our house from as ‘not having the nonce’ to do anything right then forwarding it on to him by mistake …

 But still, I use email freely and without fear. It’s like that friend you can’t help gossiping with even when you know what you say could be passed on to the wrong people. You do it anyway cos it’s like purging the soul; like scratching that itch that just won’t go away; like grabbing that last handful of peanuts when you’ve already eaten several handfuls …

 So halleluiah to email, the grandaddy of cyberspace. Long live email.