Editor’s Corner:
THE PRIMACY OF THE WRITTEN WORD

More surveys confirm my anecdotal experiences about e-mail’s takeover of the corporate world (Editor’s Corner, November 1997, "No One Talks On The Phone Anymore"). A study sponsored by Yahoo! Internet Life magazine found that 55% of computer users surveyed used e-mail more often than they make long-distance phone calls, and 33% use it more often than they make local calls.

The American Managment Association announced in April that e-mail has eclipsed the phone as the primary business communications tool for 36 perecent of 400 human resource excecutives at a recent AMA conference.

The time savings and directness of e-mail over the chattiness of the phone were the reasons I gave earlier for this shift. But what I’m finding now is that many prefer the archive that e-mail leaves behind. A magazine editor told me he’d rather brainstorm by e-mail with a freelance writer. "By the time we’re up to our fourth message we pretty much have our outline and contract done. If we talked on the phone, we’d have to hang up and write it all down from memory."

A circulation manager I know keeps all her e-mails in folders - 700!. "You never know what you’re going to need or what you have to verify," she told me.

How did the world do business before the telephone? Very slowly! But by mail. Now we do business very quickly by e-mail. Talking is not where it’s at. Verbal agreements are always risky and with information overload today, most people’s memories have become mush.

With the introduction of certified e-mail and phone retrievable messages, e-mail gains more stature and crosses over communication channels making it accessible to everyone. Advanced as we may become, regular postal mail is still king over the virtual kind that so many of us have come to love.

The question of the waning twentieth century with less than 500 days to go is: When will e-mail be the norm? The answer is, when we all survive the Y2K problem and boot up our computers on Jan 2, 2000. Then we’ll know we have a chance!