Is email evil?

Is email evil? That may seem like a stark, strange question - but consider what our inboxes ask of us.

Through remote mail, smartphones, Blackberries and tablets, email insists that there should be no place or time where the discreet buzz of an arriving message cannot be felt. And, regardless of time and place, it wants these messages to be replied to as soon as possible – in the form of more emails, feeding others’ inboxes.

Email is free and instant, so there’s no reason not to send it in vast quantities – and, just to be on the safe side, to copy everyone into every message, and to cover your own back by double-checking every step of a process in written electronic form. Email doesn’t want you to make autonomous decisions, to delegate, or to switch off: it wants you to turn everything into typed words and queries, copied to everyone. It doesn’t want you to make phone calls or attend meetings, either: the preference is for endlessly reduplicated words and attachments.

This is a caricature, but you get the point. Left unchecked, the tendencies of email as a medium are towards overwhelming, choking, ceaseless email-management – and little else.       Read Here