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Hello! My name is Amy Martin and I am an exhausted design graduate student. You can read some more about me if you'd like or check out my main portfolio site. I'm not here to talk about myself, though, I'm here to talk about email.
Or, well, I wanted to talk about how I used to discuss 80s hair metal with my fellow preteen penpal, Sarah, but do I really need to demonstrate the joy of personal letters with examples of my tween bubble writing? Probably not. For those of us that can remember a time before email, finding a personal letter in the mail was always a pleasant surprise. It was not just the content, the updates on gossip around town, the secret jokes carried back and forth month to month. It was also knowing that you're touching something that was touched and considered by someone you care about. These grand correspondences happened in slow time, in the prehistory before the internet.
Fast forward to 1995. I have my first email account, yet I still have penpals. The letters were sent much faster, of course, but they were still considered, lengthy affairs. I could easily spend hours constructing the perfect joke or anecdote to send to a friend. I would also expect equal amounts of care put into the emails I received. It was communication, certainly, but it was also writing and storytelling and, man, my friends could write. I was okay with the lack of physicality, the quality of the emails made up for it.
When IM happened, my friends talked about the death of email. We all used to exchange these profound letters that one can only write in his/her 20s and suddenly we were chatting. Quips, really, what we had for dinner and what the dog did today that eventually led to Facebook status updates and Twitter posts.
And what of poor email? What of the vehicle that used to carry our hopes and dreams? The letters stopped coming and stopped going out. I lost contact with my last penpal sometime in 2008. Now my email is full of spam, retail spam, work and disorganization.
My thesis project argues that although the current state of email is tedious and painful, in the glorious future it doesn't have to be. For the next few months I will (hopefully) generate new, enjoyable ways of seeing and interacting with email. This isn't about a new email client. There are plenty of people working on that, rather this is about future concepts of email. To get to that future, I need to know what we're getting out of email now.
There is a massive amount of research on the subject and I've ingested a fair amount of it, but to understand the problem on a visceral level, I decided to intentionally ignore my email accounts for a week. An email vacation, if you will. Not only did I get a much better understanding of what I actually use my email for, but somewhere around day 4, I began to perceptibly unwind. Sure I had to talk to people more, ask what was going on, send more IMs and more texts so ignoring one's email really isn't a solution for email overload. But the space created by excising something as habitual as checking email was palpable.
So I've started this site to see if I can get others to avoid checking their email—even just for a day or two—to see if they have a similar experience. It is entirely possible that I am nuts and I won't be able to convince anyone to take an email vacation. If that is the case, however, then that will tell me quite a bit about our current email addiction.
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