B-List Holy Grail: Email
Part of a series: B-List Holy Grails
Email lets you communicate instantly, anywhere in the world. Sounds pretty awesome, right? Unfortunately, no. In practice, 97% of my email is Nigerians trying to sell me boner pills, and the rest is from my boss.
Ryan:
Loved the way of casting email to “talk to anyone in the world – FOR FREE!”, which is something we often forget. My first FreeNet email address (ae571@ncf.carleton.ca, baby!) (it doesn’t work anymore) was something really exciting, and I remember the thrill of getting an email message was the same as getting a real message. But email quickly became routine, and now I have so much spam coming in that I have a custom-trained neural network sort it for me before I even look at it. That’s pretty futuristic too, I think!
Tim:
I was the least enthused about this entry, in that I don’t really remember this being a big thing that being reached for. Radio and then phones had gotten us pretty used to the idea of talking to anywhere in the world. I’ve since gone on an IRC nostalgia trip and so would like to revise my opinion somewhat.
Poster Child:
True enough. But email is still pretty damn awesome in my books. It’s how I do 99% of my non-face-to-face communicating, so you get a big thumbs up from me, email!
What’s this all about?
In the waning days of 2009, Julian Dibbell mentioned videophones as a holy grail technology that ended up being a b-teamer. I liked the concept so much that I ran a contest on Quiet Babylon, looking for more examples.
This is one of the shortlist finalists as chosen by a panel of judges consisting of myself, Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics & Project Wonderful and street artist Poster Child.
