The Internet, Email, and Other Dying Things
What is it about obituaries that so attracts some people? Perhaps it’s Schadenfreude, or maybe it’s a form of whistling past the graveyard, but some folks can’t wait to bring you the gleeful news that such-and-so is mortally ill — so keen, in fact, that as with Mark Twain, né Clemens[1. “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” This is the actual quote, as you can see from the image of the actual letter that Twain sent from London.], they wind up being previous.
So we have two imminent deaths reported recently that may be just a bit exaggerated. The first is the death of the internet. In 2007 Nemertes Research published a report that claimed internet usage would outstrip internet capacity by 2012 and the whole would come crashing down. Poo-pooing was widespread, but Johna Till Johnson, Nemertes’ president, refreshed her doomsday prediction only this spring. In “The Internet sky really is falling” she reminds us that it’s not simply lack of capacity that is the fatal flaw, but also a shortage of IP addresses and a failure to have an agreed-upon, effective replacement internet architecture available. Now the Cassandra has added net neutrality to the list of evils that will kill the internet. “Hello net neutrality, goodbye Internet” argues that an inability of the service providers to charge differentially for various content types will mean that general costs will go up and that will kill free “peering”: “When peering goes away, so does the Internet — because you’re no longer able to connect to anywhere from anywhere.”
An Ars Technica piece lays all this out and answers her recent arguments — principally by showing that internet use is not in fact growing exponentially as predicted. As it points out, in Canada the growth of internet traffic has slowed from a 53 percent increase in 2005-2006 to 44 percent in the following year to 32 percent in 2007-2008. They remain, all in all, quite boosterish about the continued existence of the internet.
Then there’s email.
The Wall Street Journal doesn’t exactly predict its death, but rather the end of its reign as the king of communication. “Why Email No Longer Rules…
And what that means for the way we communicate” Faster and more fun are what we want now, apparently. Which means that Twitter and Facebook are growing at great rates. Which means that we now need filtering. Which means… the future is not clear.
There’s no mention of Google’s Wave. And much of what gets retailed is old hat — certainly for Slaw readers. Besides, old hats are often favourites. So I’m not ready to bet that lawyers are about to move away from their beloved email in any numbers just yet, the WSJ notwithstanding.
I agree with the label ‘exaggerated’ – or just plain wrong.
I don’t understand net neutrality to mean that carriers cannot charge different rates for different kinds of signal. It means that they cannot charge different rates for signals from different sources (or refuse to carry signals at all from some sources) – generally because the carriers or their related enterprises compete with the content from those other sources.
So carriers can recoup the investment needed to provide greater bandwidth, just not on the basis of favouritism.
Treating Internet carriers as common carriers will not be the death of the Internet.
The fact that Facebook or Twitter are growing faster than email, or that people spend more time on FB or T than on email, says nothing about what people prefer for sending point-to-point messages, and a lot of personal communication as well as most business communication is point-to-point. (I don’t count email advertising, whether or not characterized as spam, and I am not aware that social media have yet become lucrative carriers of advertising.)
So expressing one’s thoughts, if that’s what they are, to a group of semi-selected acquaintances on FB and T etc will not be the death of a medium that has a different and continuing purpose.
I’ve read reports of email dying off before. The upcoming generations rarely use email, or at least not nearly as much as we do. While I don’t expect email to die overnight, it is interesting to consider. After all, not too long ago it was common for people to send their friends and relatives handwritten letters, but now that is considered a luxury at best. I’m perfectly willing to accept that email will be replaced by a newer more commonly used for of communication (far more so than I’m willing to accept that the internet will die any time soon).
As we get older, we tend to accept that things as they are now, as we have always (or feel like we’ve always) done them, are how things will always be–no more change is coming. People become stuck in their ways. Instead of debating whether or not this will die or that will be the next big thing, I think we need to observe the changes, learn new technologies, and be ready to make the transition when change arrives–because odds are it will, and the people who are prepared will have a head start on their competition.
I would have thought that the WSJ would have been smarter to give its perspective from the corporate or business world, because e-mail still rules in most offices. I thought this video provided a better perspective. http://www.newsy.com/videos/is_e_mail_dying. There was some mention about Google wave and how firms will still rely on e-mail.