![]() These are all possible ways of making money, of course, but the point of the information highway, it seems to me, is that it offers a new way of talking to other people. Similarly, today one hears about shopping, banking, and renting movies on the information highway. We were intimate in a curious way, in the sense of being wired into each other’s minds, but our contact was elaborately stylized, like ballroom dancing.įor years after the telephone was invented, in 1876, people thought it was a device that would transmit news, drama, and music: the idea that the telephone was a way to talk to other people took about twenty years to sink in here, and about thirty years in Europe. Generally, he seemed to write messages at night, sleep (maybe), then send them the next morning. At the beginning of our electronic relationship, I would wake up in the middle of the night and lie in bed wondering if I had E-mail from Bill. I would have a question about something and say to myself, “I’m going to E-mail Bill about that,” and I’d write him a message and get a one- or two-page message back within twenty-four hours, sometimes much sooner. We began to E-mail each other three or four times a week. You can send friendly messages very easily since those are harder to misinterpret. It allows you to exchange a lot of information in advance of a meeting and make the meeting far far more valuable. . . .Įmail is not a good way to get mad at someone since you can’t interact. Our email is completely secure. . . .Įmail helps out with other types of communication. I am the only person who reads my email so no one has to worry about embarrassing themselves or going around people when they send a message. ![]() In fact I give out my home phone number to almost no one but my email address is known very broadly. If someone isn’t saying something of interest its easier to not respond to their mail than it is not to answer the phone. There are people who I have corresponded with on email for months before actually meeting them-people at work and otherwise. However email is not a substitute for direct interaction . . . I wrote:Į-mail is a unique communication vehicle for a lot of reasons. At least, I could send E-mail to his electronic address, which is widely available, not tell anyone at Microsoft I was doing it, and see what happened. Sitting at my computer one day, I realized that I could try to communicate with Bill Gates, the chairman and co-founder of the software giant Microsoft, on the information highway. Even now, E-mail allows you to meet and communicate with people in a way that would be impossible on the phone, through the regular mail, or face to face, as I discovered while I was working on this story. In the future, people will send each other sound and pictures as well as text, and do it in real time, and improved technology will make it possible to have rich, human electronic exchanges, but at present E-mail is the closest thing we have to that. At the moment, the best way to communicate with another person on the information highway is to exchange electronic mail: to write a message on a computer and send it through the telephone lines into someone else’s computer.
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