Online interaction has allowed us to meet many new people, but it has not diminished our yearning to maintain older relationships.
It's hard to imagine a world without email. It's now the dominant form of exchange, with the typical American adult spending more than an hour a day managing the inbox. People under 25 now spend more time texting from their cellphones than talking on them. The shift has been most dramatic for "knowledge workers" like computer programmers and lawyers, who devote nearly half their workdays to email.
Back in October 1971, an engineer (who was a high school friend in Upstate New York during the late 1950s) named Ray Tomlinson chose the '@' symbol for email addresses and wrote software to send the first network email. At the time, it must not have seemed very important because Ray didn't bother to save that first message or even record the exact date. Ray Tomlinson has been called the father of email because he invented the software that allowed messages to be sent between computers. Ray made it possible to swap messages between machines in different locations; between universities, across continents, and oceans. At the time, he was working for Boston-based Bolt, Beranek and Newman, which was helping to develop Arpanet, the forerunner of the modern Internet.
Now, over 40 years later email messages are a large part of our lives in today's network society and I bet you can't remember the first e-mail message you ever sent either?
While email and the Internet have "changed everything" in the way we work and communicate, many are finding that reading and answering email messages can consume too much time; time we would rather spend doing something else. Wouldn't it be great if we could harness the good parts of email communication and do away with the bad parts?
Email has also profoundly influenced the kinds of people we interact with. According to a new study by Stefan Wuchty and Brian Uzzi at Northwestern University, we exchange the highest volume of email with those people we know the least. Perhaps it's a new colleague, or a friend of a friend, or a total stranger writing out of the blue: Email makes these exchanges possible.
"These are folks you almost certainly wouldn't talk to on the phone," Mr. Uzzi says. "You also probably wouldn't bump into them on the street. But email allows us to communicate with them all day long."
What makes this study noteworthy is that the researchers had access not only to the complete email records of a midsize company—nearly 1.5 million messages sent by 1,052 employees over a six-month time span—but also to a detailed map of social relationships. (The employees were asked to list all of their personal contacts.)
By comparing these two data sets, Messrs. Wuchty and Uzzi developed an algorithm that let them predict the nature of a given relationship based solely on the details of an email exchange. "We didn't need to read the messages or anything like that," Mr. Uzzi says. "Just looking at the speed of a reply was more than enough."
People reply to their close friends, on average, within seven hours of getting the email, the data show. Professional contacts take a bit more time: We don't hit send for nearly 11 hours. But the biggest difference came when the scientists looked at those people we barely know. On average, it took us 50 hours to reply. In other words, there's a surprisingly easy way to figure out how you feel about someone—just count the hours before you hit the "reply" button.
But this study is a reminder that even in a world transformed by digital devices, the most important things remain constant. Although we can interact with anyone, we still respond most quickly to our closest friends. We now know many more people, but we haven't forgotten which members of our circle really matter.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, December 10, 2011
