This morning I spent just over an hour working through the fifty-odd emails that had turned over the previous day; reading, responding, sending out other emails as a result, filing and deleting. Lots of deleting. Of those fifty-odd, over half were from subject-related email lists, most of which could be deleted just on the basis of the subject line; the rest were equally divided between departmental admin, school and faculty admin, student and student-related queries, research-related exchanges with colleagues, exchanges with external collaborators, other external research-related stuff, purely personal messages and proper junk. Responding to those messages that required or merited response involved, at least half the time, checking information on the university webpage or on external sites. At a rough estimate, given that emails continue to arrive at a similar rate, I’ll have spent at least a fifth and possibly a quarter of my time by the end of today working through them.
This is *not* a traditional academic rant about the pernicious encroachment of email on every corner of our working lives. On the contrary, given that we’re still in the neighbourhood of the 25th anniversary of the invention of the internet, I thought that a quick celebration was in order. I still have vivid memories of my first tentative steps onto the World Wide Web, during my year in Lampeter in 1994-5; the slow discovery of random bits of fascinating information (I recall a site that compiled links to interesting things about chocolate), my gradual mastery of html to create the first departmental websites, first for Lampeter Classics and then, early in the next academic year, for Bristol (I also recall the sense of possessiveness when a colleague objected a few years later to the rather nice marble effect background I’d produced for Bristol, let alone when the university started to take an interest in corporate branding and so brought an end to the exciting variety that resulted from dozens of different approaches, as well as making it harder to exercise hard-won skills in hand-crafted html coding). It’s now taken entirely for granted that most information will be found somewhere on the web without much difficulty; then, it was a matter of surprise and delight to find anything, let alone anything that was actually useful.
I don’t actually have much recollection of the development of email; it must have been much more gradual, and less wonderful, and a more passive process, getting to know the system that the university provided rather than forging one’s own tools. But what a difference it’s made; how else could I manage to remain in regular contact with so many foreign colleagues and develop collaborative research projects, or keep up with what’s going on across the globe? Lots of activities would still take place – chasing up miscreant students, developing departmental research strategies, being informed of school and faculty things – but in most cases it would take so much longer. Of course there’s a loss of personal contact with colleagues, and even with students – more and more queries about essays and the like come in by email rather than in my consultation hours – but email helps manage the serious co-ordination problems now that we’re all so busy; I can respond to queries when I have time, colleagues or students can respond when they have time, and it can all be sorted out far more quickly than if we have to wait until a physical meeting can be scheduled. It can’t replace face-to-face contact for everything – departmental discussions occasionally have the same risk of misunderstanding and talking at cross purposes as the flame wars that break out on mailing lists every so often – but for lots of purposes, this is a means of managing an ever-expanding workload, making best use of the time available.
Of course, it may be just that I hate telephones so much…
Sphinx 
“…how else could I manage to remain in regular contact with so many foreign colleagues and develop collaborative research projects, or keep up with what’s going on across the globe?”
Er, post?! People did maintain recognisable “research relationships” over vast distances. Obviously the difference is that there would be a couple of weeks between contacts, rather than a matter of a couple of hours/instantaneity. I’m not for a minute saying it was better in my day, but people did communicate! The biggest advantage of email I find is that one can send the same ‘letter’ out to as many people as you like, the closest equivalent to which in the old days would have involved laborious copying or forwarding of mail.
Didn’t mean to imply that it was impossible, but it’s a question of speed and scale – the phrase to be emphasised here is the “so many”. I do find it difficult to imagine how one could easily have co-ordinated the work of different people in different countries. Of course, I do also mourn the passing, for all intents and purposes, of the physical letter; there’s never going to be a collection of the email correspondence of the great historians of our time…
Email had been going a long time before the Web started to be used in universities. I used it as a graduate student in the late 80’s and well remember the baroque headers which accompanied any email you had sent to another institution, and the UK’s persistence in ordering domains the opposite way round from everyone else (thus: uk.ac.cam). But it lacked the visual aspect of the Web, and its worldwide exposure; it was essentially a way of passing plain text between mailboxes. Take up of email was slow until the 1990s – I recall one notable Cambridge classicist refusing to use it at all ‘because people use it for gossip’.
I was, I must admit, a fairly non-technical student – hacking out my thesis on one of the one Amstrad word processors in the early 90s, I have no recollection at all of email until I was actually working in Bristol. Looking back, half of me thinks it would have been so much easier to co-ordinate supervisions with undergraduates if email had been common, the other half suspects that it would have made things far worse than fixing date/time a week or fortnight in advance because they’d have felt quite at liberty to reschedule at 24 hours’ notice, if that…