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E-mail or Facebook?


First it was email or e-mail? Now, its social networking which seems to be the rage. Twittering, etc. etc. Whither direction?


"It doesn't seem all that long ago that we were wondering whether email should be spelled e-mail or email – it was that novel. But not only is the younger generation eschewing email for Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging or SMS, but the venerable electronic mail has its detractors in the world of business, too.

Electronic mail has been around since the Sixties, first being used on networks that were forerunners to the internet: ARPANET, CSNet and so on. But interoperability between different networks remained a challenge, and it wasn't until the development of the web that email really took off. The hows and whys, and the fact that email was actually an important tool in the development of the web itself, are all really rather boring so let's not dwell on them here.

The point is that last month the CEO of one of the world's largest IT services firms, Atos Origin, said that he wants the company to be rid of email inside of three years, describing one by-product of the electronic communication technology as information "pollution".

"The volume of emails we send and receive is unsustainable for business, with managers spending between five and 20 hours a week reading and writing emails," said Atos's Thierry Breton. "We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives. We are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organisations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the Industrial Revolution."

Breton certainly has a point: the firm noted that the average worker gets 200 emails per day, of which 18 per cent are spam. Meanwhile, middle managers spend over 25 per cent of their time searching for information."

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