Are you the type of person that writes carefully considered and elaborate emails? Or are you the type of emailer that responds with one brief unstructured sentence? Whichever it is, emailing has made a significant impact on modern forms of interaction. But has it led us into a world that is void of thoughtful communication?
In this week’s podcast, we discuss email. We discuss the origins of email, Google Wave, Whatsapp functionality and the postal service. Finally, we share the communications technologies of the past we wish were still with us.
A few things we mentioned in this podcast:
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing improving email. Go for it, Nick.
Speaker B:So this topic was suggested by a conversation I had or inspired by a little interaction I had on Facebook with a friend of mine, Aaron, who is a very thoughtful kind of guy which comes over in all his correspondence, Facebook posts, emails and so on. And he was saying he feels compelled if he's writing an email to spend a lot of time thinking about precisely what he's going to say. Often we'll have sort of several points that he'll address. And apparently some people have said to him, this is a bit oppressive because we get an email and it's like, well, actually, I've got 10 minutes to reply, but actually I've got like seven things I need to address here and I feel like I need to really put some time into this. And it's almost like this is a bit of an imposition on other people. But actually, it sounds to me like what he's doing is treating emails a bit like letters where you would necessarily take some time. And in fact, because of economies of scale, you probably want to get as much as you can into the letter because then you've got to go and post it. You don't want to be posting five letters. You want to do one big letter with all of that stuff in. But at the same time, I can see the point that his interlocutors are making in that, you know, I also feel a bit oppressed by big, long emails when I sort of think, well, you know, this actually a conversation or something will be quicker. But that's but then we're missing out. We're missing out on the realm of the olden day. You know, you think of the man of letters, someone who, you know, is a fecund correspondent and is often, you know, will write long and well thought out missives. I feel like that is a medium we have really lost. Now, I know there are things like blogs, but that's more like an open letter. This is more like if you want to have a conversation with someone remotely, plenty of time to think about it, no pressure to reply immediately. We've lost that. And it occurs to me that's because email has really taken the it's taken the place of one aspect of communication, which is sort of quick, almost like telegrams or, you know, postcards like, you know, here's a quick thing you can dash off. But it's also sucked the air out of the room for lots of other types of communication, and it's not really perfectly suited to all of the things it's trying to do. So my question really is, am I right? Is email, has email sort of really, is it having a negative effect on certain types of communication? But what could we do? What can we how can we change email to try and make it more conducive to those different types of communication?
Speaker A:But also, is it the case that we're saying stuff like texts, WhatsApp, things like Slack, let's say, Gchat, etc., telephone calls, whatever. They're all pretty well defined and understood in what they do. Well, and the one that doesn't quite fit everything is email.
Speaker B:Is that what we're saying? Sort of. Although I do want, I mean, I think those things fit into the same continuum of things, which is like, OK, why is it that a certain communication tool will find itself being used in a certain way? Right. So is it accident that we write emails using a thing which is a bit like letters with an inbox? And yet we, you know, have quick chats in Slack, which is organised differently. Discord is organised differently again. Like all of these things. Actually, the communication, what happens on them is quite different. Is that an accident? A bit like the way that, you know, LinkedIn and Facebook are basically the same. But one of them is sort of pictures of your auntie and your cat. And another one is pictures of you in a suit giving a presentation. I know why I'm not getting many friends on Facebook. But I'm not getting those job offers. But the point is that it's very hard to pin that on a design feature of the platform. But that's a path dependent thing. It's just LinkedIn have gone down that route. And that's what people use it for. And Facebook has gone a different route. But it feels a bit like, well, actually, the differences between the way Slack is used compared to the way that, say, WhatsApp is used or, you know, that is more of a design feature thing. So the question is, what design features does email have that we could tweak? How do design features of a communications platform affect the way it's used? All of those things, really. But how can we make email better so that Aaron can find a place again in the world of electronic communication? So you're asking the right person. Great.
Speaker A:Because I can help you with this. Oh. Because I need to teach you.
Speaker B:No, because we've covered this before. Peter and I both hate the way you use WhatsApp. Stop doing it. But I like it. Listeners, what he does is he leaves bloody voicemails. And then you have to sit there listening to a voicemail, which takes a minute to listen to, but it would only take five seconds to read. Yeah, we discussed this.
Speaker A:This is basically me imposing my inconvenience and transferring it to you. Yeah, it's quicker for you, slower for us. It's good, but you get to hear my voice. No, but I can help you with this. What's important with analysis and decision making is to decide what your aim is. Because at the moment, it's fairly undefined. You said, oh, we need to make email better. Well, what does that mean? So what do we want from, let's not even call it email, what do we want from this form of communication?
Speaker C:So I can build on that.
Speaker A:Go for it, Peter.
Speaker C:For a change, rather than just normally what I do is ignore everything you've said. Yeah, right. Exactly. I'm well aware this is a good trajectory. Another way of asking a similar question is, why do we use email when we could or should use something else? So why is email sometimes used a bit like instant messaging for those very quick little backwards-forwards communications, when it would be probably better to pull out your phone and use WhatsApp or Slack or other tools? I can use email on my phone as well, by the way. But anyway, keep going. Yeah, well, yes, I know you can. I've put it on there. But what is it that makes you decide when you're getting in touch with me to use the WhatsApp that we have or the email that we've got? So in my mind, I think what happens is quite often the time people abuse email to try to use it as an instant messaging thing. I think email is great. I think email is, the underlying technology is atrocious, but the way that it works, the sort of the model, the analogy of it being a letter, I think it's great for exactly those kind of long-form, thought-out...
Speaker A:So I've forgotten, you said, hey, we need to re, let's put this question in a different way.
Speaker C:What was the question? So why do we sometimes abuse email to use it in certain modes that it's not designed for?
Speaker A:This is not building on my thing at all, but keep going.
Speaker C:Yeah, I've completely forgotten what you said.
Speaker A:I said, what's the aim?
Speaker B:What do we want from it? Okay, well, actually, and Peter saying abuse implies that there is some sort of intended use, which I'm not sure I quite understand, because if people are using something a certain way, then who cares what it was intended to do? But also I want something explicit. What do I want it for?
Speaker C:What I'm getting at is that there are other alternatives that you should or could be using instead of email for those kind of modes of communication for which email is not suited, right? So you are abusing email. But why? Sorry, explain why it's not suitable.
Speaker B:Because actually, instant messaging through email, you know, they're going to get it. Not only that, you keep a record of it in one place. Unlike with WhatsApp messages, you know, you can, I don't know, it just feels like it's also accused itself.
Speaker C:I'll tell you what, this is saying it's bad. So hold on.
Speaker A:This is more a note to myself than to Nick. Let's stop interrupting Peter. I mean, myself more than anyone. Go for it, Peter. Keep going.
Speaker C:So you're abusing it because that's not what email was designed for. This sort of rapid backwards and forwards kind of communication. That's where things like Slack and WhatsApp are designed for those things. Email came about during the early internet history to provide some asynchronous communication. Back in the day when you couldn't rely on your connection being up all the time. So instant messaging would be hard. And when there were high costs involved in dialing up, both for the server providing connections in to the main trunks and things. And you also use a sort of remote user connecting in. So you needed some way of asynchronously communicating and plus your bandwidth would be pretty low. So instant communication was poor. So email's optimised for this old world that we no longer have.
Speaker A:And despite promise not to interrupt, and I'm not being facetious here, but the clue is in the name, right? Electronic mail.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker A:That I think was envisaged to an extent as, hey, this is a bit like sending letters, but it's not letters. It's electronic.
Speaker C:And I also think it's optimised also for the early adopters of email were institutions. So they were big businesses, academic institutions and government. That's the people who led the way on email in a time when they were pretty highly structured, pretty highly sort of formalised processes in which, you know, you wouldn't talk. You'd never as in your little booth talk directly to somebody in another team. You'd all go flow up and down and be through memos and traditional, putting it through tubes and things. So the email, this email analogy mapped more closely onto mail because that was what suited who used it mostly at the time. Now, there were obviously there were instant messenger things around. ICQ, MS Messenger, Yahoo Chat, all of these things cropped up. And were in lockstep in the early days of the internet. But one thing that email did that these guys never did, email settled relatively quickly on a set of standards to allow anyone to set up an email server and be able to talk to anybody else with an email server. Whereas all these chat things remain very proprietary and stovepipes. So with email, what you can do is, if all I need to know is your email address and I can send you an email, like similar with mail, I can send you a piece of post if I know what your postal address is or even something similar. But the problem with the chats is because I need to know which provider you're on as well as your email. So I have a proliferation of different chat providers. So I've got different groups of people on different chats. So that's a big problem. So the technology coalesced on a set of standards that allowed anyone to communicate with anybody else. So yeah, but to return to my original, so yeah, so the, I think, yeah, we tend to abuse email. Email was designed and matured in a certain situation, but was kind of more widely adopted as the default go-to way of communicating over the internet when perhaps other things should have also been there as an option. In the same way, you know, the same way we used to post, we used to telegram each other, we used to telephone each other, we used to physically go and talk to people. We had the town crier. We had all of these options and you would choose a different one. Whereas email for a big period became, was the only way that people communicated. And then these chat things started to come back again. So it's, I think, is it the case that we're abusing email to do something that it's not? Now, there is, there were lots of interesting experiments along the way. One that stands out particularly for me was a thing called Google Wave, which you may never have heard of. It's one of the plethora of Google projects which started off looking really promising and then they killed it because they couldn't monetize it. The Google Wave was a really interesting experiment to try to unify email, instant messaging, and collaborative document editing into one thing. So you'd have like one unified inbox that would be everything from documents, instant messaging, and email all in one place. It probably died mainly because it was not, it was sort of perhaps, it wasn't widely adopted quickly enough to become sort of useful. It was competing with loads of other chat things and loads of other, and email was already pretty prevalent.
Speaker A:Although it kind of exists now in another form in the Google universe, everything does connect pretty seamlessly.
Speaker C:Yeah, so the model now is you have separate windows, separate sets of functionality which interoperate. This was all actually on one window as it were? This was actually one window. So you'd have, so a wave would, you could think of a wave as like a topic and the way, so the topic might be a project that you're collaborating on and you could, people could join it, you could, yeah. So it was sort of, but it was like, it's a different model. They moved away from this one window do everything to multiple windows do everything with lots of interconnectivity. So yeah, lots of interesting experiments. But email still is king, I think, and I think it has a place, but we tend to incorrectly use it.
Speaker A:So let's see if I can give a reasonable summary of what you've just said there, which is along the lines of email came along at a certain time, offered certain benefits, quickly became the default way to communicate rapidly. And then a bunch of other stuff comes along as well, which can sometimes feel, for someone of my generation, this other bits and pieces feel peripheral. But for me, email is kind of still at the center of how I communicate, certainly professionally.
Speaker C:And it's reinforced as well, that your email is the center of your digital identity.
Speaker A:Yeah, exactly. Maybe I'm overregging the generation thing, but maybe sort of younger people or people like yourselves understand the differences between these different platforms and so on.
Speaker C:I think it's more instinctive to people because you feel that you sort of fit in with a norm around the people who are using it. And if the platform has got the right kind of affordances in it, it's aligned with what the platform is trying to achieve, so that you're not butting up against functional constraints with it, but it works the other way. So I know people in my extended family who write long-considered WhatsApp messages, which is equally jarring because you've got a several-page scrolling thing going on on a phone. Put me in touch with them. I've got a solution for them.
Speaker B:Yeah, but the trouble is, well, yeah. So I think there's a number of things there. There's like the editing. So I'm just thinking about what is jarring about that. It's very hard to edit things on WhatsApp. It's hard to edit things on a mobile. And WhatsApp is designed for mobile. It's hard to have complex structure because you just have a bunch of messages one after the other. So it's designed around a conversation model, multi-way conversation model, that isn't necessarily suited to long things. So it's kind of – and also it's chronological, chronologically organised. So I'm just trying to identify some things that are true of WhatsApp that might make it different to email, for example. Because I think those are the things we need to look at. What's the chronological bit? Sorry, I didn't quite understand that. Basically, when you reply, your reply appears there and the next reply will appear below it. And there's no other organisation method. Well, what about – so how does that compare to email? It's pretty similar, but I mean, the difference is that – yeah. I mean, it's actually – I mean, WhatsApp is quite similar to email. So it might be the key difference is really about the kind of editing tools available or something. But that's what I'm trying to drill into. I'll just put some numbers on the world of letters, because Peter's kicked off at the internet. But if we go back, there was a time, actually, before the internet. Was there? In the olden days.
Speaker A:My kids always ask me about this. Go on.
Speaker B: al Service was established in: Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B: million letters were sent in: Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker B:Yeah, which is – Within the UK, this is? Possibly, yes. OK. Just in the UK. Actually, quite a surprisingly large amount. I think the population of the UK was 10 – the order of 10 million, maybe. So, you know – That doesn't seem terribly surprising to me. Well, that's because that's a letter a week per person.
Speaker C:Yeah, but I think a big part of that would be business-to-business communications. Well, nonetheless.
Speaker A:You've got letter-writing engines, essentially, where people communicate. Let's look at the headline numbers. Yeah, keep going.
Speaker B: Was it: Speaker A:The last time I got one was from Jehovah's Witnesses who had popped it by hand through my post. But it probably only looked handwritten.
Speaker B:Oh, no, it definitely was. So, now, let's contrast that with emails. So, what I'm saying is at the height, average, probably one or two letters per day per person-ish, right? Now, apparently, the average worker these days gets about 120 emails, 40,000 a year. Yeah, 120 emails per day, right? Yeah. And apparently, I mean, something like half of them are even ever opened without being deleted. So, I reckon we get about 100 times more email now than we ever got letters back in the day. So, there you go. Maybe email was designed to replace letters. But whatever it's doing, by a factor of 100, people are using it for other stuff. Now, obviously, it's extremely low cost, which looks like a benefit, but may, in fact, be problematic, of course, because, yeah, all of it takes time. And the problem is, you know, it's almost like we have consumed that benefit. You know, a bit like when people get safer cars, they just drive more dangerously. We've consumed that benefit of much, much easier communication by just doing more of it and much less valuable. So, the point is that it has necessarily has devalued what an email means. You know, do you remember in the late 90s when it was tremendously exciting to have an email? Now, it's just another flipping chore. So, yeah, I suppose that's all really. I just wanted to put that into context, right? So, it isn't just that it has changed the type of communication, it's massively increased the volume. If not, I dare say, actually, the overall time. I would think that the amount of time people spend managing emails now is probably substantially more than the amount of time they ever spent writing correspondence, even at the height of the time of letters.
Speaker A:And it shows you what happens when it's kind of more or less unfettered, this ability to communicate across the media.
Speaker B:Yeah. So, just a couple of thoughts about just a few things that I personally, when you think about the things that, you know, you used, how did you used to do it? So, organising things, which is, we've even done a podcast about how annoying it is to try and organise a meeting over email. Of course, you used to do this over the phone. One person would say, this is when it's happening. So-and-so's available on that. You've got to make it. And you just would. The sort of information pull, which is where your people want to know things and you tell them, you know, stuff that people need to know. But also, you know, obviously, massive amounts of information push, junk email, stuff, people trying to tell you things that they think you want to know and you probably don't. That used to be junk mail. Expressing thoughts, that's letters, right? That's one of the things- Or WhatsApp voicemails are good for that. Then a to-do list. It also works as a to-do list. That's how I use it. I use it as a list of, and in fact, to the extent that, you know, I've got my calendar sends me email reminders. And I then, you know, I'm able to, if it's not urgent, I can just snooze it till I can deal with it. So really, it's become, it's fight, it's people, it's all those things fighting in my inbox with a to-do list at the same time. And yeah, and so only a very small amount of that is what letters were for. You know, there's loads of other stuff which used to be, you know, telephones or talking or, you know, communal billboards in the town square.
Speaker C:It's quite an early sort of cultural phenomenon to describe your inbox as your to-do list though, isn't it? So I think, you know, if you extend letters to include like internal memos and things, you'd have your inbox, which would be all the things I'm getting to. And you talk about, oh, well, I'll move that to the top of my inbox, or that's going to go to the bottom of my inbox. It's a really useful metaphor, isn't it? Yeah.
Speaker B:But you're right. I mean, that concept actually maps over pretty well. But there were still things that wouldn't have gone near an inbox that these days are still in your inbox. Like your calendar wouldn't have interfered with your inbox in the same way it does now. And your, you know, your personal correspondence wouldn't be fighting with, you know, things that someone just wants to know. There would be a kind of, you know, anyway, go on.
Speaker A:Look, three things.
Speaker B:Yeah. One.
Speaker A:Yeah, we talked about the problems. All animals like to communicate. That's what they do, right? Yeah. I think. I'd sign up to that. I'm sure if you take a crab, an eagle and an elephant. Yeah. Get walking to a bar. And if they looked at us as humans, and if they were able to talk to each other, they'd go, my God, they talk a lot. Seriously, I think that's what we're talking about. Like we, and this is inferred by what you said about email is low cost. Brilliant. Suddenly there's way more emails than there ever were letters. Information obesity. Boom. There you go. Communication obesity. Yeah. We just, we're primed for it. We're hardwired, it feels like. And it's, and which too, makes me feel a bit depressed and overwhelmed. Because I think everyone can feel a bit overwhelmed like this, but me more because, you know, as you know, I've got ADHD, I've got ADD. I can't deal with all this. And I found as I get older, and not only did my responsibilities in life get increased, there's all these more methods of communication. That's why I keep missing your meetings and your messages. No, I agree. I hate it. Yeah. And so that's my cri de coeur, which we need to all move to Wales and do nothing and sit on a desert island in Wales. Three, back to our original point, because we need to wrap up shortly. Using email wrongly. You know, how can we improve it? That's how we tabled this at the beginning. So what is the answer? Because so far, we've just identified a list of issues, why it's become like this. Is that it? Do we leave it? You know?
Speaker B:Well, I think Peter mentioned the word affordances, which I think is really handy. Yeah, I think that's the first time I've ever heard that word. Now, that was the second. Right. Well, it's a really useful idea. It's like the things you, well, the knobs, basically, aren't they, affordances? It's like little handles and things that tell you, that suggest how something should be used. So you can...
Speaker A:Well, what's nice, I'd never heard that word. But immediately, one can sort of go, okay, that makes sense.
Speaker B:I know what you mean. So for example, the fact that email, by default, organises chronologically. So the things that have just come in appear at the top. Unless you've got that stupid chat setting on. But for example, you could have it organised by sender, for example. And if that was the case, it would be totally different. Or you have it organised by conversation, which again, is totally different. All of them will encourage you to behave in different ways.
Speaker A:Well, let me frame it in a different way. It is what it is. It's probably going to be around for a bit. Therefore, do we just accept that people don't use it as it should be, in inverted commas. And we just live with that. Or it's already got design elements to it that can allow you to make sure you only use it as you should. I don't know. We just, it is what it is.
Speaker C:We live with it. I mean, I'm more of a fan of, I'm a big fan of the options of different types of communication, medium to suit different jobs. What we could really do with, I think email should be more or less left as it is. I kind of, it has a place and it kind of works. I think perhaps your, perhaps the interface that you have could give you more options for making it easier to organise, sort, filter your emails. I think some email clients do a great job, some are less so good. But I think, I'm a big fan of the options. But what we need is, we need a standard, like email. So email, great, because all I need to know is your email address and I can get an email to you. Right? Not so true for chat things. So I need, yeah, as I said before, you need to know what platform you're on. I need to then get on that platform to be able to- Yeah, the presence of an email address in itself means you have email contactable,
Speaker A:whereas just a phone number doesn't mean you're on a, yeah.
Speaker C:Yeah. But yeah, with a phone, with a phone number, I can get you with any other phone. So what we need is a sort of instant chat equivalent of that, that's universal. Because that would mean you always have then the option of saying, well, is this a conversational thing that doesn't need to be live? It could just be a stream of set of things around a topic. Okay, that's an instant chat message thing. Does it need to be live? That's a phone call. Does it need to be more considered, longer form, more professional inverted commas? Then that's an email.
Speaker B:So there's also, I think retention is another important thing. Like one of the reasons I don't like having things where someone's asking you to do something in Slack, I hate it. Or, you know, when people send me WhatsApp messages, which are like, oh, were you available at this time on that? I don't know. Nothing is going to make me look at this message again. You know, there's no system in a WhatsApp message that's going to tell me to look at that again. The persistence of email is also a really useful feature.
Speaker C:Yeah, well, maybe there are features we need to add to things. So Slack, for example, we use Slack internally in the company. It's got a neat feature where if somebody asks you a question, you can't answer it straight away. You can put a reminder on there and say, remind me about this in an hour or a day. Very quickly.
Speaker A:It sounds like a nightmare feature to me. But anyway, go on.
Speaker C:Yeah. So if it's a question that I need to answer, but I can't answer right now, that's what I'll do. It's the same with email. It's the same mechanism really as snoozing the email using your email.
Speaker B:Which to me is a huge game changer.
Speaker C:I don't know how to do that. Makes life much easier. So another feature that I use in email and Slack is using that as a sort of task management thing. And that gives me a list of all the tasks that I need to do. What would be nice, though, is if I could unify all those things. So I get my tasks in a single list, which is outside of the email and the Slack into one place.
Speaker B:It needs to be integrated but separate. Yes. Yeah, because I think the issue is about this. I think the way that conversations are organized, I would say, is really a chief driver. So in Discord, for example, people have servers. Is that another? What's Discord? It's another online... Is it like Slack or something? It's like Slack, but it's used mainly by young people and gamers and that kind of thing. But each individual has their own... Think of it as an area. Like you have your own server, which will be dedicated to people who like certain things, say, or who are your friends or something. But then within that, you have channels which are covering different aspects of those things. That's pretty cool. So it's kind of conversational. I mean, it's not unlike Slack, but really the way that you experience Slack is more as a bunch of channels at any given time. It doesn't feel as easy to switch between servers in Slack. Email, of course, is organized by just when they come in, by default. So I feel like that, to me, that really drives the different way in which I use those things. So I think if we could get emails to somehow be... It's almost like some of them. You know the Eisenhower matrix, where it's like, is it urgent or not urgent? Is it important or is it not important? I mean, the correct response to an email is going to depend on actually way more than when it arrived. Like the ability to maybe just put emails into different brackets. Like these are the things I don't need to respond to at any time. These are the things I can do in five minutes. These are the things... And then just delete the rest. You know, it's like the ability simply to have emails organized in a different way. I feel like that would almost get rid of the problem because it would immediately become different things. I might want some conversation-based channels like Slack, where emails are kind of effectively messages in a conversation. I might want to have some which are like task-based. I might want some that are long thought out, letter backwards and forwards. But it's like, I don't mind that they're all emails. What I mind is that there's only one way of viewing them, really, which is, you know, the time they come in. Sure.
Speaker A:A couple of things. Tagging can help. It doesn't entirely solve what you're talking about. Yeah, there's also suddenly there's work. I've got a concept for you. Go on. It's going to blow your mind. Two words. Artificial intelligence. I don't know if you've heard this. It's brilliant. Go on. It's the future. Right. Well, it sounds to me like the kind of things that you're talking about, whereas let's say there are kind of four, this Eisenhower thing, right? Let's say there's four different ways that you might respond or categorize emails. If you start doing that, this sounds fairly simple for something like AI to start to understand that and then present it to you in whatever form. I mean, that's the bit where I fall down on a bit is how it's presented to you.
Speaker B:If only there was some kind of multi-agent system that could help organize our workflows. Yeah. Yeah. We've just done a project about that.
Speaker A:Okay. We need to round this off. So look, let's go right back to the beginning. Who was the guy who wrote to this? Right. And what was the question? I don't know. The problem was he was overly ornate in his emails.
Speaker B:Well, no, I don't say overly. He was ornate in them. His quality standard for emails is higher than other people's. And it's costly for other people to have to respond to that. I feel like...
Speaker A:Buy him some lovely stationery for Christmas.
Speaker B: s love letter to Anne Boleyn,: Speaker C:She was a fan of birds. She liked birds. Yeah.
Speaker B: -year-old girl in: Speaker A: , the thing he nailed up, the: Speaker B:Oh, the 95 Theses. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, the thing is that these are all really interesting, important documents. And I must tell you that that's only the tip of the iceberg. Right, of course. There were more than just three or four letters sent in history of humanity. But they're examples of the genre. And I just feel like, you know, we're drifting into a world where we don't have them anymore.
Speaker A: the famous Instagram post of: Speaker B:You know, precisely from, you know, from Prince William to Kate or something. You know, the equivalent of the Henry VIII love letter. Where's it gone? It's sitting on an Instagram server somewhere. Who knows? But the point is, how do we get letters back? How do we make letters great again? Well, a technology solution that would do the job. And it's no good just saying, well, use email like letters, because that's not going to work. We need to have somewhere which is like a special space, which is for people who want to engage in that kind of thing. I think the only answer is coercion. Of the whole system.
Speaker C:It won't work. Coercion and bullying. I think there is a place for that. And the technology could help. So there's a service that's provided to the friends and family of service people when they're abroad, which is akin to telegrams. And essentially, you can write a, it's like an email. You write an email and you email it to a particular email address. It then gets printed out on those little folded up rip edge things you get when your pay slips come in. Awesome. Like that. And then it's printed. So it's printed in theatres. They have a bunch of blank sheets. They print them off and they deliver them. And it's like getting a letter. It's typed. So you haven't got the...
Speaker A:You're saying this exists or we're going to do this? Yeah, this exists. So this exists. Oh, yeah. Sorry. You said this is the military.
Speaker C:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that could scratch an itch of getting a physical letter back that's technology driven. So you've got the convenience. So you just have to write, essentially writing an email. That's one option. I think there's also another option, which I'd really like, is when your post still comes to your door. So somebody is physically bringing the letters and sticking them through the door. I'm a big fan of the American system. In some places, you can put letters in your own box for collection, thus reducing the effort of not having to go to a post box, which could be a quarter of a mile away or a mile away. So you write a letter, you stamp it, and then you put it in your inbox with a flag up to say, there's a letter in here. Come and collect it.
Speaker B:OK, I think I have a proposal, which is sort of pulling together some aspects of this. Yeah. Something like a, you know, kind of basically a web service, letter.com. Nice, nice. I bet it's taken. Yeah, I'm sure it is. But we'll think of a better. I think I could do better on the name. But the point is letters with a Z dot com. Yeah, letter, L-E-T-T-R. Cool. And the point is, is the interface is just it looks like a page. It's designed for reading, right? There's no formatting or any of that crap. You just have text in paragraphs. There's no farting about. There's no photos, no images. You just type a letter and it's addressed to someone. And when it's finished, it is sort of that then it then hangs around for a couple of days. You can't touch it anymore. It's not editable now. It hangs around for a couple of days. And then that the recipient gets an email reminder to go and look at it. And it's just a link. And when they go and look at it, there it is. And they can then write a new letter in reply or say something like, I'm not. I don't want to reply to this, but thanks anyway. But the point is, you then have. So it's not a document. What it is, is like, here's my thing and it's finished and complete. And I can't go back to it and edit it. And because it takes two days to arrive, you actually use a good incentive to get everything right before you send it. So the delay is a feature, not a bug. It's a feature. And that just means that by the time you're ready to send, you really are ready to send because there's no sending a follow up and say, oh, sorry, I meant to say this. And then and then you know, the next person's letter is kind of put in the same folder in some sense. You can leaf through them. You can see the correspondence, but it's in the correct order. So in other words, you see the first letter first.
Speaker C:And presumably, crucially, you don't have an outbox. You don't have a copy of what you originally wrote. Once it's gone, it's gone. Yeah.
Speaker B:Yeah. And everything is kept there. All of your correspondence is saved there. But it's no longer coming. It's no longer interfering with your daily life. You can go and read that when you're ready.
Speaker C:I can see that with a nice minimalist interface. Oh, I love it.
Speaker B:Hopefully, that would tick Aaron's box.
Speaker C:Yeah, type on a nice mechanical keyboard. Exactly. On a black and white screen. I would enjoy to do that.
Speaker A:You would enjoy to do that. Yeah. So we need to stop. Super, super quick question. Kind of like one word answer. No explanations. Bit of technology, communications technology that pretty much no longer exists that you'd like, that you would like to use, that you'd like back.
Speaker B:Anything? Yeah, well, I don't really want this to come back. But one of the best communications I ever received was a fax. It was a really nice, unexpected fax. It was my 18th birthday. I was in a history class. And the school, one of the admin team came in with an email from a family, sorry, a fax from a family friend, which said, happy 18th birthday. Welcome to the world of adult responsibility. And they handed it to me in class. Oh, it's so nice. That's cool. Yeah, yeah. But it's because I had no, obviously, with an email, I mean, this person could just, it would just appear in my inbox. Yeah, it's a whole different. Much more exciting. It was like almost like a tele, getting a telegram or something. But he could just at home with his fax machine, send a fax to the school and out it popped. So, yeah, I certainly wouldn't want fax machines to reassume their position in everyday life because they're awful. But it's a shame that we've lost the ability to send someone a physical letter, which just appears. That's rather nice.
Speaker A:I'll do one, then we'll finish off you, Peter. Drumming. Ah, yes. Drumming. I'd like more drumming around. Do you mean like when communication through drumming? Yeah, always. Yeah, communication. Like, oh, there's something going down. Yes. Different kind of drums. Part of my place at night was going, bu-dum-bum-ba-da-bum-ba-dum. But anyway, I don't want to get too carried away with it. But I think drumming would be cool. Yeah.
Speaker B:Not that it was ever a particularly big thing in the UK, I think. But not to direct it at one person individually, I guess. It's all out in the open, isn't it? Yeah, something about drumming. I think we need more of that.
Speaker A:Peter.
Speaker C:I don't think I've ever seen one. You could make them enormously and beautifully steampunk these days. I'd love to have an office that used those to get things around to each other.
Speaker B:Yeah, well, I think Peter and I, in our top 10 films, is probably Brazil, which envisages a world where the technology is all pneumatic tubes. And there is a real attraction to that.
Speaker A:Nice, nice, nice, nice. All right. I rather enjoyed that. Actually, no, I didn't. I got really weary of it after a while. It just made me feel very overwhelmed. We don't need your life story. Yeah, likewise.
Speaker B:It'll be up to the listeners to decide.
Speaker A:No, you think you don't need my life story. All right, we'll stop there. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.
