Discursive Final Conclusions
● Instructions:
○ Using the various perspectives featured in Article A and Article B, draw a
conclusion about whether or not email still has value in modern society. Draft a
formal concluding paragraph that responds to the following prompt: To what
extent is email an outdated form of communication in today’s digital society?
ARTICLES WITH THE PERSPECTIVES BELOW:
Article A
Imagine a life free from the daily drudgery of deleting an Inbox full of ‘unbeatable offers’ and ‘sales promotions’.
Or worrying no more that a suspect email has broken through your multi-layered computer protection system. Or
trying to pretend that you never received something, blaming it on the Web for ‘losing’ it, even though it is highly
unlikely to have actually become ‘lost in the ether’. Can you even remember the days when you actually became
quite enlivened to open your email every day and wonder what fascinating messages you had received? What once
used to be fun and exciting is now a dull chore, a regular necessity - trawling through the Inbox.
But perhaps there is hope for us all. First, the Twitterati are already logging off some emails because of their
pedestrian nature, and soon companies may stop using them too. Some will even ban them totally from the office
very soon. Although 1.8 billion email users regularly send over 107 trillion emails each year, is this when the
impending death of our most popular form of communication? Certainly we have come a long way from smoke
signals, tom tom drums, carrier pigeons, runners, the telephone, faxes, and the like, but could this be a step too far?
One CRO, Thierry Breton, claims that only 10 percent of the 200 electronic messages each of his employees receives
on an average each day turn out to be useful. He believes this deluge of unnecessary, wasteful electronic information
will be one of the most important problems a company will have to face in the coming years. It is time to think
differently, out of the box, creatively, he says.
So, instead of email, his 75,000 staff will be made to instant message and chat-style collaborative-service
communication, inspired by social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Internal email will be phased out
within the next eighteen months at this company. His staff used to spend up to two hours a day sifting emails, but
now this new system reduces that work time by 20% and frees them for more productive activities.
His strategy has already been adopted by teenagers, of course, who are now shunning a middle-aged email system
which was first developed as far back as 1971. As my daughter recently explained to me quite succinctly, ‘email is
for losers!’ Indeed, email use is down 31% among the 12-17 year age group, with a further slump of 21% amongst
the 18-24s. Mobile IM (instant messaging) services like Blackberry Messenger and Yahoo Messenger have
supplanted the ponderous email for the tech-savvy next generation. Already 8 trillion text messages were sent
around the world in 2011 by 1.5 billion mobile IM users. SM offers the immediacy that an email cannot, and they are
harder to ignore reading and responding to.
However, none of these present email replacements are entirely suited to the workplace, and those teenagers fortunate
enough to find jobs in the next few years will still find themselves enmeshed in email’s spam-blighted grip. Daily,
more and more companies realize the possible potential of sending advertising messages to private customers’ email,
and even if millions of consumers ignore and delete their offers it only needs a minute percentage to say ‘yes’ for
