Re the fuss about social media – can you remember when you started using e-mail?
Anybody over the age of – say – 40 should be able to remember a time before e-mail.
And indeed they may also remember the time when e-mail was introduced to their business.
If you are old enough cast your mind back. Did it run smoothly? Was it accepted universally immediately? Did you know what to do right away? What protocols did you have to develop – quickly?
There was a time when the question ” do you have e-mail” was more often met with a “no” – but they did have a fax machine ( remember them?).
And people did say that it was just a fad and would not catch on
And they said that you would not find them using it ( being able to type or use a keyboard actually being a barrier in itself way back then)
And they said that it was not appropriate for doing serious business together – far too informal ( how many e-mails in those days started and ended with Dear… yours faithfully….)?
Seems so long ago doesn’t it? But we are talking about the mid- 90s ie only 15 years or so ago.
I wonder how long it will take for us to have embraced social media as just another business communication tool?
And I wonder what is being developed right now as the next new thing!
Feb 25, 2010
Hi Jackie,
At 41 I remember only too well the introdution of email.
The first time I really recall the subject coming up was when I was on the news desk of the Daily Record in Glasgow.
At that time one of us would get the daily task of ploughing through the huge pile of paper and fax press releases and other material sent to the paper.
Then one day – probably around 1995-96 – I ended up in a chat with colleagues to discuss a baffling new communication tool called email.
A phone message on a post it note was passed to us by one of the reporters. Someone was trying to get in touch and wanted us to reply to them via email.
We weren’t fazed by the fact none of us had email (or had really even heard of it).
What really left us scratching our heads was the email address. We repeatedly questioned the reporter to make sure he had taken down the details correctly.
Surely no-one in their right mind could really expect us contact them in a complicated and non-memorable way?
We take email addresses for granted now, but at that time, I would have been hard-pushed to come up with anything which seemed weirder.
For instance, even though I made my living at a keyboard, I don’t think I had ever previously had cause to use the @ key.
The rest of the email address also seemed totally counter-intuitive.
It was one long list of letters all running together with that weird @ symbol in the middle and a really odd and non-memorably suffix.
It is difficult to explain now (even to people who were there), but I remember looking at this and thinking: “It looks like someone has randomly strung together a bunch of tiles from the Scrabble bag.”
My how we laughed. We were openly dismissive that this new-fangled piece of nonsense would ever catch on.
All of the reporters I knew could easily reel of thirty or forty phone numbers for their best contacts – police, government, good PR people etc.
But how could anyone every remember something which said: firstname.surname@randomorganisation.com?
Funny how quaint that story sounds, even to me, just 15 years down the line, eh?
Feb 25, 2010
I remember being tasked with making regular communication messages to America …… going to the telex room!!! And I am only 41. It seemed like star trek actually going to a special room to type out a message which would go straight to America!!
Feb 26, 2010
I love it ! Thanks for sharing that Isabelle – now even sure I know how telex worked? Fun remembering though