1 Chapter 1: Introduction- Why Study Email Pragmatics?
☞ Authorial commentary is italicized.
We live in a world shaped by email. Despite rarely prompting feelings of joy, exhilaration, or wonder, email writing is likely to be the kind of text creation most people will spend most of their professional lives writing. That might seem to be a bit sad- it’s a medium that doesn’t offer much in the way of vibrant creativity- but emailing is important because it’s how work gets done. Think of the important moments in your life, both professionally and personally- those moments at least tangentially rely on an email being sent.
Getting a job? Email doesn’t just touch almost every imaginable career path, it’s also how you’ll reach out to the hiring manager.
Starting a business? You might work with your hands, but you’ll need to email clients invoices.
Buying a home? You’ll need to send an email to your realtor confirming the specifics of your offer.
Despite being one of the oldest digital technologies still in regular use, emails are the backbone of our world. Whether in a midtown Manhattan office building, from a laptop charged by solar panels in the parking lot of a national park, on a battered ThinkPad balanced on a commuter’s knees in a swaying train car, tapped out in the waiting room of a doctor’s office on an iPhone, or quietly typed on a keyboard in a home office while a baby naps, email is how people work.
It’s more than reasonable to ask- why still use email? It’s old, often frustrating, time consuming, and never anyone’s first choice for a creative outlet. In fact, there have always been competitors to emailing. An old-fashioned letter in the mail, various flavors of texting, and a variety of apps (Slack for the workplace, Signal for war plans) that have more chat-like features and security options- there are almost endless alternatives. Email writing is a daily fact of life for a few reasons- it works, it’s ‘open’, and it’s official & everywhere.
It works.
One of the advantages of email being an older technology is that it has had decades of time to mature. Email platforms are ubiquitous, generally reliable, and function well with limited or inconsistent connections. As a technology which came of age when internet speeds were far less reliable and much slower, email works well under even finicky connections. That’s especially important for how most people engage with emails, which tends to be split between mobile devices on cell network based connections and computers with more stable connections.
The servers which store, send, and receive email don’t need to be the newest and best models. Organizations can own their own servers or easily outsource them. Email doesn’t work well with multimedia like photo and video files, but it does function.
That means that email is also very cheap to deliver. Smaller companies and organizations can purchase their own email servers and run them on their own, with clients accessing their messages through a variety of free, open source, or cheap software platforms. More commonly, stakeholders can purchase institutional licenses for server space and client management.
It is ‘open’.
Email isn’t a proprietary messaging platform, like most of the other technologies that have sought to replace or augment it. For a Google Hangouts or a Slack message, both sender and recipient need to have installed the same app. Email doesn’t require a shared platform, and users can access their email in a variety of different ways. Outlook, a tab in Chrome, the Mail app on iOS have the same access to email and users can choose the platform that works best for them. A multitude of apps and programs can present information downloaded and sent from an email server- those messages aren’t app-specific and could conceivably be accessed via any platform a user or organization chooses.
While email server settings and security controls can be changed to reject external senders, and while most email services allow for users to set a blacklist of senders (usually to reduce spam), the vast majority of email accounts allow anyone to send and receive messages to anyone else. All that’s needed is knowing a specific user’s email address. Senders and receivers just need to know each other’s email address- nothing else is required to communicate.
It is ‘official’ & everywhere.
Email is how communication occurs in business and professional environments. Simply put, nothing happens without an email. Emails are easily and cheaply storable, and as discussed earlier, email is open and a well-developed, reliable technology. We may not love email, but it is the messaging platform where everything we do happens.
‘On the record’ conversations- a complaint about a product, setting deliverable guidelines for the team, offering a contract, speaking on behalf of an institution, writing a memo, choosing a meeting time with colleagues- all of these depend on email communication. Having those messages in the form of an email is likely a combination of technical legacy (email certainly has competing messaging platforms now but didn’t for decades after its introduction) and the factors which make email the choice for institutional talk.
It’s difficult to imagine a messaging platform more suitable for official purposes- email works best on a computer with a keyboard, messages are easily searchable, accounts can be controlled by multiple people, delivery is almost instantaneous, and organizations can customize server settings and access platforms almost endlessly.
Email is also an older technology that wasn’t built with features other, newer messaging mediums have baked in- message encryption, easier handling of validating user identity, better handling of email threads with multiple replies, multimedia attachments, formatting that can vary in appearance by email platform, etc. Those can be considered weaknesses of the platform, but it also means all email platforms work essentially identically and older hardware can run email servers very inexpensively. Email is so widespread that even devices which are otherwise hopelessly out of date can still easily run it.
Furthermore, almost everyone connected to the internet has an email address. Having an email address is essentially a prerequisite for using any number of apps or digital services. For example, email is how passwords are reset, we use it as part of the login process for any number of apps, and it’s even linked with the user accounts on our phones. For all its faults, in a digitally fragmented world, email is the universal technology.
