Stephen Green is torn on the issue of net neutrality, with his libertarian side thinking Internet service providers ought to be able to “charge what the traffic will bear” on their equipment while his conservative side preferring to preserve a status quo that works well to an unknown future.

I’m on the same fence but do agree with Mark Cuban that certain types of information might oughta be less privileged than others. Most obviously, things like torrents. To the extent bandwidth is limited, it makes sense to prioritize email and search, things essential for modern life, over movie downloads and other frivolities that threaten to clog the pipes.

The Post Office has charged differing rates and promised different delivery priority for a whole variety of mail for as long as I can remember. 1st Class letters are treated differently than 4th class bulk rate magazines and those willing to pay extra can get expedited service.   I’m not entirely sure why that model couldn’t be applied to the ‘net.

“Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.” So begins a column by Jessica Vascellaro in today’s WSJ.

We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.

Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don’t need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public “status” on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.

[...]

Years ago, we were frustrated if it took a few days for a letter to arrive. A couple of years ago, we’d complain about a half-hour delay in getting an email. Today, we gripe about it taking an extra few seconds for a text message to go through. In a few months, we may be complaining that our cellphones aren’t automatically able to send messages to friends within a certain distance, letting them know we’re nearby. (A number of services already do this.)

These new services also make communicating more frequent and informal—more like a blog comment or a throwaway aside, rather than a crafted email sent to one person. No need to spend time writing a long email to your half-dozen closest friends about how your vacation went. Now those friends, if they’re interested, can watch it unfold in real time online. Instead of sending a few emails a week to a handful of friends, you can send dozens of messages a day to hundreds of people who know you, or just barely do.

[...]

David Liu, an executive at AOL, calls it replacing the in-box with “a river that continues to flow as you dip into it.”

I’m more “wired” than most, spending an inordinate amount of time blogging, Twittering and the like.   Indeed, I started this blog nearly seven years ago as a substitute for my previous habit of emailing links and clippings, often with brief commentary, back and forth my my friends.  I frequently instant message or direct message people for things that need immediate responses.

But none of it is going to replace email.

A river of information is interesting.  It’s why I finally “stuck” as an active Twitter user after two years of brief flirtations and not “getting” it.  But, even if you’re only following 100 people or so, you’re going to miss most of what’s in the river. And if you’re following 1000 or 2000 people — hardly uncommon — you’re going to miss almost all of it.  Which is perfectly fine if you’re looking for witty commentary, updates on the latest breaking news, which of your acquaintances out and about in Adams Morgan, and the like.

While it can be used that way, email isn’t, at its core, a mass communications platform.  It’s a means of direct communication with another person asynchronously.  If I need to let my wife know I’m running late, send my deputy an attachment for posting on the company website, send my folks the latest pictures of the baby, or any number of things that I actually need another person to read — not just have available to them if they happen to be wading in my river at a given moment — there’s no good substitute for email.

Twitter direct messaging is great if you can say what you need in 160 characters, including spaces, and the person’s following you on Twitter; otherwise, not so much. Texting is rather intrusive and, since it tends to set off audible alarms and cost the recipient money, borderline rude.  Instant messaging is also generally annoying, as it demands a person’s attention NOW rather than when they want to take the time to read messages.  Ditto telephoning, which I now reserve almost exclusively for extended conversations with friends and family a long distance away, quick bursts for when I can’t wait for email, or certain types of business transactions.

I haven’t yet used Google’s Wave, which may streamline the current flow of the river and avoid some of the fallbacks of the email alternatives.  The way we’ll use email will continue to evolve, too, much as I’ll now send someone to a blog post or an online photo album.  But we’ll always need something like email:  a direct, asynchronous means of sending infinitely variable types of information to specific people.

Update (Alex Knapp): Reading the above, I would just note that this is one in a string of articles over the past few years about the death of email, the death of voicemail, the death of the telephone, etc. These pieces tend to have one thing in common: they are written by tech journalists who, in their day to day business, are sifting through the constant stream of information on the Internet. You will note that they are almost never written by people with jobs outside of that industry, because everyone else with an office job gets more email and voicemail and phone calls than they can handle without investing in any one of the number of time management programs like Getting Things Done, etc. Speaking for myself, if email is dead, why do I get 100+ of them a day? And why are they communications that really can’t be handled any other way? If the phone is dead, why do I spend so much time on it getting work done?

Before proclaiming the death of a particular type of communication, it would be nice if journalists of this ilk actually did some, you know, reporting from a regular office and not just their laptop at home.

Matthew Moore marks the 40th anniversary of the Internet with a list of “50 things that are being killed by the internet.” My favorites:

1) The art of polite disagreement
While the inane spats of YouTube commencers may not be representative, the internet has certainly sharpened the tone of debate. The most raucous sections of the blogworld seem incapable of accepting sincerely held differences of opinion; all opponents must have “agendas”.

Because I make a living writing things on the Internet, I’m especially aware of this. There’s no matter sufficiently trivial that it can’t spark a nasty flame war.

2) Fear that you are the only person unmoved by a celebrity’s death
Twitter has become a clearing-house for jokes about dead famous people. Tasteless, but an antidote to the “fans in mourning” mawkishness that otherwise predominates.

Both a good and a bad thing, as Moore suggests. While some respect for the recently departed’s loved ones is nice, the Internet is a welcome alternative to the hagiographies of the weird but famous to which we’re otherwise treated.

3) Listening to an album all the way through
The single is one of the unlikely beneficiaries of the internet – a development which can be looked at in two ways. There’s no longer any need to endure eight tracks of filler for a couple of decent tunes, but will “album albums” like Radiohead’s Amnesiac get the widespread hearing they deserve?

I owned hundreds of cassette tapes and probably still have 300-odd CDs. I rarely listen to them anymore and haven’t bought a new album in perhaps a decade.

17) Watching television together
On-demand television, from the iPlayer in Britain to Hulu in the US, allows relatives and colleagues to watch the same programmes at different times, undermining what had been one of the medium’s most attractive cultural appeals – the shared experience. Appointment-to-view television, if it exists at all, seems confined to sport and live reality shows.

As I’ve noted previously, I tend to watch non-sports and news programming well out of phase, often catching them a year or two after they’ve gotten going and sometimes waiting until the entire run is complete. When I saw the bold headline, though, I thought he was going somewhere else: The fact that having a notebook computer in the living room often means that we’re looking something up and only half paying attention to the television, much less others in the room.

50) Your lunchbreak
Did you leave your desk today? Or snaffle a sandwich while sending a few personal emails and checking the price of a week in Istanbul?

I’m quite guilty of this. Even when I “go out” for lunch, I usually grab something to eat in front of my computer.

Norm Geras points us to LAT book editor David Ulin’s essay lamenting the “lost art of reading,” specifically the difficulty in concentrating well and long enough to read books.   Norm says it’s easy:  “You get a book. You switch off various things. If it helps, you close the door. Then you sit down and read. In due course, our man tells us, he does get there. But my, the difficulty. ”

Snark aside, however, Ulin has some good points.

Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves. [...]  Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.

When I was in graduate school 15-odd years ago — before the World Wide Web as we know it, much less Web 2.0, existed — my two major IR professors were having one of those internecine debates that happen in academe.  The more senior prof wrote books at a prodigious pace and eschewed articles, especially those which crunched data, as a waste of time.  The younger argued that most books were OBE by the time they came out and that they tended to belabor a point that could be easily made in an article.  The Web/book argument is essentially a continuation of that debate.

I read non-fiction almost exclusively and have gone from being a book person to an article person.  The efficiency of getting 85 percent of the point in eight pages that I would get in 300 pages has made it so that I seldom read books cover-to-cover.  Even very fine books, such as David Kilcullen’s The Accidental Guerilla, are hard to finish because my inner editor quickly says “yeah, yeah — you’ve already said that in a slightly different way in the previous chapter.”  To be sure, each new case study reveals additional nuances.  But everything beyond the introductory chapter presents a very high work to reward ratio.

Further, the combination of the Internet and the DVR means that we’ve come to expect the ability to access only the information we want and the quickly skip over that which doesn’t interest us.  It’s hard to do that with books.

This point, later in the piece, is especially salient to me:

For many years, I have read, like E.I. Lonoff in Philip Roth’s “The Ghost Writer,” primarily at night — a few hours every evening once my wife and kids have gone to bed. These days, however, after spending hours reading e-mails and fielding phone calls in the office, tracking stories across countless websites, I find it difficult to quiet down. I pick up a book and read a paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my e-mail, drift onto the Internet, pace the house before returning to the page. Or I want to do these things but don’t. I force myself to remain still, to follow whatever I’m reading until the inevitable moment I give myself over to the flow. Eventually I get there, but some nights it takes 20 pages to settle down. What I’m struggling with is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it’s mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age.

For me, it’s slightly different.  Yes, there is email and Twitter and YahooNews and whatnot to distract.  More importantly, though, is that after spending fourteen hours or so reading, analyzing, and writing in front of a computer screen, reading for pleasure is too much like work.  My bedtime reading now consists of exceedingly light fare like Sports Illustrated or Esquire.

While most people don’t write for a living, the computerization of the office means more than ever spend a large part of their workday reading and writing.  That’s significant to this discussion.  When most toiled on their feet all day, sitting down with a book provided a wonderful change of pace.  Nowadays, it’s same old, same old.

Photo by Flickr user ranoush under Creative Commons license.

Via Twitter (@MelissaTweets and @Armano) I see a week-old NYT piece from Steve Lohr titled “Smartphone Rises Fast From Gadget to Necessity.”

For a growing swath of the population, the social expectation is that one is nearly always connected and reachable almost instantly via e-mail. The smartphone, analysts say, is the instrument of that connectedness — and thus worth the cost, both as a communications tool and as a status symbol.

“The social norm is that you should respond within a couple of hours, if not immediately,” said David E. Meyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. “If you don’t, it is assumed you are out to lunch mentally, out of it socially, or don’t like the person who sent the e-mail.”

The spread of those social assumptions may signal a technological crossover that echoes the proliferation of e-mail itself more than a decade ago. At some point in the early 1990s, it became socially unacceptable — at least for many people — to not have an e-mail address.

I’ve had a BlackBerry for a couple of years now and have been a quick-turnaround responder to emails for a decade or so.  (The rise of spam, into which category I place most pitches by PR firms and others seeking to have me blog on their topics has diminished my response rate considerably.  I do, however, tend to respond quite quickly to “real” emails received between, say, 7 am and 9 pm Eastern that seem to call for a response.)  Being able to keep up with my communications without being tied to my desk has been invaluable and I far prefer the asynchronicity of email to the interruption of telephone calls.

The social — and, increasingly, professional — expectation of being constantly available, however, is much more bane than boon.  I’m generally more than happy to take a couple minutes out of my evening or weekend to help someone out with a quick question so they can continue progress on whatever they’re doing without waiting until 9 am the next workday.  But, for many people, it has become more than that: a culture where one is never truly off work.  While I have no idea what to do about it, that’s not a positive development.

UPDATE:  Melissa Clouthier observes,

Moms are never off the clock. And there’s always a kid interrupting, bugging, and harrying the mother during her tasks. I’ve breastfed. The smart phone has got nothing on a 3 month old.

With smart phones, we’re all mothers now.

Of course, the smart phone is in addition to life’s normal demands.  The fact that the baby’s crying because her teeth are coming in doesn’t stop the emails from coming in.

People under a certain age have stopped using voice mail, Jill Colvin reports for NYT.

When it was introduced in the early 1980s, voice mail was hailed as a miracle invention — a boon to office productivity and a godsend to busy households. Hollywood screenwriters incorporated it into plotlines: Distraught heroine comes home, sees blinking red light, listens as desperate suitor begs for another chance to make it all right. Beep! But in an age of instant information gratification, the burden of having to hit the playback button — or worse, dial in to a mailbox and enter a pass code — and sit through “ums” and “ahs” can seem too much to bear.

[...]

“Once upon a time, voice mail was useful,” said Yen Cheong, 32, a book publicist in New York who has transitioned almost entirely to e-mail and text messaging. According to her calculation, it takes 7 to 10 steps to check a voice mail message versus zero to 3 for an e-mail. “If you left a message, I have to dial in, dial in my code,” Ms. Cheong said. “Then I mess up and redial. Then once I hear the message, I need the phone number. I try to write it down, and then I have to rewind the message to hear it again,” she added, feigning exhaustion.

I’m reminded of an Eddie Murphy routine from roughly the era when voice mail was introduced in which he made fun of the advent of one-push automatic windows and wondered about people who were so lazy they couldn’t hold down a button for three seconds.

Still, while I remain sufficiently fit and possessed of the mental stamina to withstand the rigors of checking my messages, I join Matt Yglesias in vastly preferring email.   I often forget to check my voice mail for days on end and my wife simply won’t check a message, preferring to return any missed calls that show up on her mobile.

Danielle Citron makes an interesting point, however:

Does this trend have meaningful consequences? Document attachments in our networked age have largely replaced faxes just as the telephone largely displaced the telegraph in an earlier time and common thinking has little regret about these developments. But perhaps this trend may have some lasting significance that might be worth considering. The more we leave to text and less to voice, the more messages may get misconstrued. We cannot tell if someone is joking or is upset from text and more often text can send misleading signals about our emotions (unless the stray emoticon provides some help, which is certainly less prevalent in the professional sphere). It also may have an effect on litigation, to the pleasure, or great pain, of many lawyers. The more we write down, the more we tend to raise problems for ourselves, and hence the more that attorneys have to sift through in discovery. To be sure, voice mails are discoverable, but they are less likely to provoke a series of other voice mails where a text or email can lead to a disastrous series of replies, often written in haste and possibly in anger. This may be a true boon to e-Discovery consultants (as my civil procedure students would wisely suggest). And the more that we write down in digital format, the more chance that such information could be hacked, leaked, or sent to an undesirable audience at the expense of privacy and reputation.

That’s especially interesting given that so many of us are using Gmail and other online messaging systems and no longer delete read messages.

Gina Trapani transcribes a corporate whiteboard offering solutions for “Workday Quality Over Quantity.”

Check email ONLY:

• 10AM
• 1PM
• 4PM

Send any time
Set email to check every 3 hours.
NO email on evenings.
NO email on weekends.
EMERGENCY? = Use phone.

FOCUS 1-3 Activities max/day
LOG 1-3 Succinct status bullets every day on team wiki

MINIMIZE chat
MAXIMIZE single-tasking

OUT by 5:30PM
~No excuses~

This sounds great.  But it strikes me as implausible and even inefficient.

For one thing, other people in the office are going to be rendered rather unproductive if they email me things and I go three hours — or even eighteen or sixty-six hours! — without checking it.

Screw them, you say — it’s about maximizing my efficiency?  Well, presumably, they’ll then learn that email isn’t an efficient way to get information from me and they’ll start calling or banging on my door.

Now, granted, I check email pretty much constantly unless I’m in the middle of a significant writing task.   So, maybe I should shift to, say, answering email once an hour or so during workdays and a couple of times in the evenings and on weekends.

Christine Rosen has a good piece called “The Myth of Multitasking,” which begins,

In one of the many letters he wrote to his son in the 1740s, Lord Chesterfield offered the following advice: “There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.” To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one’s time; it was a mark of intelligence. “This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.”

She also quotes a study that found “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.”

Former Alabama football coach Gene Stallings used to say, “Don’t confuse activity with accomplishment.”  A lot of people work hard all day but accomplish very little because they’re not focused and can’t prioritize.   Most would almost certainly be better off getting a significant task or three done each day that working on a dozen tasks and making hardly any progress.

Then again, most people don’t control their own schedules and are often putting out fires and dealing with the latest “emergency” someone higher up the ladder is screaming about.

The New York Times has a long-winded article that states the obvious: not too many people have President Obama’s email address.

It is now the ultimate status symbol in a town obsessed by status. Mr. Obama was spotted last week trying out his new BlackBerry — or actually a more sophisticated, encrypted variation — and aides say that he uses a computer in the study next to the Oval Office but that he has agreed to limit the number of people he would exchange e-mail with. In the process, he created a new measure for Washington to judge who really has the ear, or the thumb, of the president.

Is anyone actually surprised by this? Good lord, I get 300+ emails a day with all of my various activities, and nothing I do is as remotely important as the job of the President. I can’t imagine that President Obama could get much done if his email address was widely distributed.

Did it really take three reporters to come up with this obvious fact?