E-Mail

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E-mail Summary

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E-Mail

The most important new medium of mass communication of the past 40 years was not in any way connected with television, moving pictures, or the recording industry; it initially emerged, instead, as a project of the U.S. Defense Department. In the 1960s, the depart-ment's Advanced Research Projects Agency, in coordination with several research institutions, came up with a system for connecting or "networking" distantly located computers using independent, dedicated telephone lines. Researchers using the system experimented with sending simple text messages to one another over the network. Soon, the trickle of research-oriented messages and data became a tidal wave of information exchange of all kinds. The new medium of "electronic mail" eventually changed the way we interact with our friends, co-workers, and families. It also brought our everyday reality much closer to Marshall McLuhan's pipedream of a genuine worldwide community rooted in technology.

The practice of sending electronic messages from one person to another actually predated computer networking. A few years before the ARPANET, users of "time-sharing"-style computer consoles developed a simple system of sending memos to a central "mailbox" located on a mainframe computer used by a variety of users at different times. Each user had a file of their own to which the messages were directed and were able to pick up their messages during the time when they were using the computer. The practice was important to the future development of electronic messaging, but had little or no utilitarian value at the time; it was a mere toy. The ARPANET engineers later picked up on the idea and decided to see if they could send small messages and memos from one computer to another. It worked; they then began to send messages over the span of the nationwide ARPANET itself. To paraphrase one beneficiary of the ARPA's research, it was a small step for a few computer geeks, a giant leap for the global village.

The system was not only useful for the researchers but also proved to be a pleasant pastime—so pleasant, in fact, that ARPA director Stephen Lukasik worried that it could jeopardize the entire enterprise. In Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon's history of the Internet, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, Lukasik said he told the researchers that if "you're going to do something that looks like it's forty thousand miles away from defense, please leave our name off of it." It was clear early on that e-mail was useful for much more than just the military and technological research for which the ARPA was founded in 1957.

By the mid-1970s, engineers discovered that messages could be sent through the ARPANET by those without official authorization to use it. The message-sending capability of this network was obviously universal, and through the demonstrated use of satellite technology, global. Anyone could tap into the network to send messages of any sort to virtually anyone else, anywhere else in the world. The message of this medium was limitless interactivity, not mere broadcasting. The ARPANET eventually gave way to a new, more enveloping network known as the Internet and the uses of e-mail quickly mushroomed.

The possibilities of the Internet were soon tested. In the early 1970s, individuals wrote anti-war messages and mass-mailed them; one electronically advocated Nixon's impeachment. Other mass-mailings became routinized around a variety of subject-headings that were of interest only to certain groups: this later became that part of the Internet known as Usenet. On Usenet, e-mail messages were sent to a central server and mass posted to a kind of electronic message board where all could read and even reply to the message. If one was interested in gardening and wanted to talk about it with other gardeners around the world, one could use software and server space to organize a group. Other forms of mass-e-mailings included discussion lists; in these, one needed to subscribe privately to the list and messages were routed directly to one's private mailbox rather than to a public message board.

E-mail also entertained in more traditional ways. Many used the Internet's e-mail capabilities early on to play fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. More serious uses of e-mail soon came to the attention of the U.S. Postal Service, and even President Jimmy Carter—who used a primitive e-mail system during his 1976 campaign—proposed ways of integrating the new technology into a postal system that originally delivered messages on the backs of ponies.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the culture that first blossomed in the 1970s began to flourish among a worldwide community of computer users. Hundreds of thousands of people now understood what it meant to be "flamed" (told off in a vicious manner). Multitudes decoded the meanings of the symbols called "emoticons" that attempted to convey facial expression through text. ;-) meant a wink and a smile: the messenger was "just fooling" and used the emoticon to make sure his plain text words were not misunderstood.

As the medium matured, private companies like Compuserve and America Online built private networks for individuals to dial in to send and receive electronic messages. New electronic communities formed in this way and were soon burdened with such "real world" issues as free speech, crime, and sexism. Many women complained of electronic abuse by the predominantly male on-line community. Predators sent electronic messages to children in attempts to commit crimes against them. Some of the private networks regulated speech in "public" forms of electronic communication and this met with scorn from the on-line community. Others used e-mail as an advertising medium, mass-mailing ads to hundreds of thousands of Internet users. This practice, known as "Spam," is held in almost universal disrepute, but is as unavoidable as smog in Los Angeles.

E-mail became ubiquitous by the late 1990s and the lines blurred between public, corporate, and private networks. By the late 1990s, many large corporations standardized their e-mail systems on Internet protocols so that interoffice mail shattered the physical boundaries of the "office" itself. Using e-mail, one could now effortlessly "telecommute" to work, rather than physically move from home to a separate workplace. With the boundarylessness of Internet-based e-mail, users could play at their work, and work at their play. The discovery of e-mail literally changed the ways that we live, work, and communicate with one another.