The e-thrill is gone

If you’re my age, first of all I’m sorry. Secondly, you probably remember how excited we all got when faxes first came out. Imagine: you could send letters… over the phone! It was as though technology, in some kind of Trekkian leap, had figured out a way to disintegrate paper and ink molecules and transmit them over the lines to be reconstituted at the other end into really crappy, shiny paper.

Or maybe your understanding of how this worked was way more advanced than mine.

But then there was email! If faxes were amazing, emails were jaw-droppingly… well, they were just totally rad.

So here we are, 20 or so years later. What do you think about email now? Yeah, I thought so.

Here’s my latest radio piece on the demise of email. It originally aired on CBC Radio’s “Breakaway” on March 26, 2013. It’s three-and-a-half minutes long; do you have the attention span to make it all the way through? Yeah, I thought so.