The “cost” of receiving emails, or Why Michael Arrington should stop complaining

The other day as I was zoning out in a class, I started thinking about the progression of communication in the past hundred or so years. Before the telephone, the cost of communicating a message, especially long range was extremely high in both time and money costs. Because of this, only the ideas of the most capable people were spread around. The only way to collaborate was with people in your local town while sitting in the same room or area. The messenger boy industry was thriving at this point.

Even writing a letter was expensive in the sense that you had to be extremely clear and think through what questions the receiver might have. And it took a long time to go back and forth. (Not that being extremely clear in your message is important, but you can easily ask for input on your half-baked ideas in a cost efficient manner.) Overall, mailing a letter sucks hardcore, which in turn is why DirecTV sucks hardcore, but that’s for another blog post.

Then the telephone came out, despite the protests of the messenger boy industry lobbyists, and we had instant communication around the world (that is, once the telephone network was developed). Yet, it still was expensive to communicate using this mean. Plus, in the early years you may have had to physically travel a ways to use a telephone. The idea flow was opened up a bit more than before, but collaboration was still fairly limited. Plus, it cost the receiver time, because he or she had to stop working and answer the phone.

Now we have emails, texts, social networks and such that have lowered the cost of communication immensely and have opened the flood gates for the flow of ideas. Once the physical internet infrastructure is in place, the possibility of communication and collaboration is endless. Inc. Magazine actually published an entire issue collaborating exclusively using the internet.

I have no problem posting my email for anyone to see, especially thanks to Gmail’s spam filter and other filtering capabilities, my email inbox is automatically organized. Plus, I can easily pick out important senders quickly, and I can go through unknown emails when I have time later. Which brings me to my next point about email and other text based communication: you can reply when you have time, which lowers the cost even further (the cost of time) because you don’t have to stop what you’re doing when you receive an email.

Michael Arrington wrote a blog post complaining about receiving too many emails. I admit he obviously receives way more emails than me, but I still think it shouldn’t be a big deal. To confirm my suspicion, I emailed Mark Cuban asking him his thoughts and agreed with me that receiving emails “costs” basically nothing. If the owner of the Dallas Mavericks can somehow manage to personally respond to emails, I’m going to put forth the claim that anyone can.

I think it only benefits society to have worldwide instant communication at extremely low cost because it drives innovation. Do you agree? Also, Mr. Arrington, you should look up the definition of “ignore” and implement that when checking your email.

Oh and my email is g [dot] dutton [at] gmail [dot] com; go hog wild.

Originally published at www.fakeweblog.com on March 31, 2010.