Technology's effects on individual and society relationships over twenty years

Email and Its Effect on Society

The invention of the telephone was one of the greatest in human history, greater even than, for instance, the light bulb or, for that matter, fire and its many uses. The telephone is not only an instrument of convenience; it is an instrument that brings society together.

In that fashion, email is doing much more efficiently and dramatically today what the telephone did decades ago. Email is both a manner of paper trail - all aspects of a conversation are recorded - and a cheap (even free) manner in which to instantly communicate with people literally around the world.

There is virtually no stagnation of the travel of ideas across our globe today. If, for instance, an inventor in Novosibirsk has an idea for a new supercollider component, he can email his patent attorney in Philadelphia immediately and get an assessment as to how to proceed with the project. The only limitations to communication today are time zones - the patent attorney may be asleep - and our own proactive decisions to avoid the information superhighway.

Places as poor as Bangladesh and Sumatra have seen a veritable explosion in connectivity, as prices of internet access of plummeted. In fact, we have seen with the terrorist attacks and subsequent scares, that terrorist networks even depend on email and email technology both to spread their ideology and to communicate with each other about plans for future attacks.

One book of the last 20 years that drives this understanding home like no other is "The Daughters of Freya," written by Michael Betcherman and David Diamond. The book is actually emailed to purchasers in installments. As a mystery, the genre of the book is accelerated by the forced pauses in its revelation to the reader.

The emails that arrive are actually in the form of emails from characters to one another. This way, the reader is entirely immersed in the mystery and the lives of the characters touched directly by the mystery.

In fact, the purchaser of the book never knows when the emails will arrive, so it is not as though the reader has control to flip forward and satisfy curiosity: No, the reader is at the authors' mercy.

Of course, there are the obvious observations that this technology both dealt with in the novel and the technology used to disperse it are cutting edge and reflect our time; but there are other important sociological observations of "The Daughters of Freya" as well.

For instance, we as readers may not know when the next installment is arriving, so it is literally as though we are waiting by the phone for news. We as readers become integrally immersed in the plot.