What does a ‘Forward’ email button do to society?
- What happens if I didn’t have a cc button, a bcc button, a Forward button?
- What happens if I didn’t have “attach document, attach spreadsheet, attach presentation” buttons?
- What happens if I did have “attach link, attach video, attach audio” buttons, much like Facebook?
These features all arose from a very obvious demand/need, so perhaps it’s pedantry to ask “what if”. But as a thought exercise, these are outstandingly incisive questions pertaining to the nature of 21st-century comms – with huge ramifications. What would be the implications for collaboration (work, organising your social life), cross-fertilisation of ideas, intelligence and mastery of concepts and finding the words to express them, if email had never had a Forward button? What is ‘attach video’ or ‘attach link’ doing to our culture and our media (viral media springs to mind, but what are the deeper ramifications)? What about communication, decision making and innovation in the workplace (by forwarding, do we encourage groupthink)?
And although these very obvious features to introduce, what isn’t so obvious is when to exclude them. JP (confused of calcutta) makes the salient point that actually, on the daddy of all social networks, Facebook, there ISN’T a ‘forward this message’ option. It had never occurred to me, but thinking about it, it’s potentially protecting my fb inbox from a huge volume of tosh, chain mail, etc. Its omission makes facebook messaging a cleaner, more useful comm tool, one I pay more attention to.
I’m going to try and cut down on simple forwarding and linking – both to improve the usefulness of my communication, but also because nobody ever learned the contents of a document by photocopying – you learn your lecture notes by processing them (into essays, abridged notes, etc) – so there’s a benefit to my contacts, and to myself.
In the age of Information Smog and the Attention Economy, knowing when NOT to forward/link is a valuable and important skill.
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