Miss a crucial email? Mr Murdoch, we feel your pain

UNTIL NOW, few things have been able to elicit empathy with James Murdoch. Unless you too are an embattled dark prince to an ageing billionaire media mogul, it’s kind of hard to put yourself in his position.

But amid the many unbelievable, unthinkable aspects of the News of the World/News International hacking scandal was this: when Murdoch claimed he just hadn't read an important email that informed him of much of this, you couldn't help but think, Oh yeah, there but for the grace of Outlook . . .

The average worker sends or receives 110 emails a day. Murdoch isn’t exactly the average worker, so let’s presume he instead has a team of average workers whose job is to filter emails for him, and still he missed one back in 2008. At least he says he did. (His former chief legal adviser says otherwise.) Let’s be honest: who hasn’t used the I-didn’t-see-the-email excuse once or a thousand times in their working and personal lives? It’s one of the many benefits of email, an asynchronous medium that can linger in the inbox a while. It’s the built-in opt-out of a communication tool that has been at once invaluable and tyrannical.

Recently, a French tech multinational, Atos, gained itself some publicity by announcing that it was to end internal email by 2014. The head of the company, former government minister Thierry Breton, says that its 80,000 employees are spending too much time on internal emails – 100 of them a day – and “not enough time on management”.

Atos calculates that only 15 per cent of these internal mails are useful, the rest being variations on “okay”, replies-to-all that didn’t need to be replied to at all, and information that wasn’t important to those receiving it but needed to be acknowledged anyway. And when workers go home, Atos claims, they spend a further 15 hours a week checking internal mail externally, just in case they missed something.

Atos’s plan is to replace this with a combination of instant messaging, face-to-face meetings, phone calls and online documents that everyone can edit.

(In the The Irish Times, some of us use Google Docs as a planning tool to be updated regularly by the group. It is an excellent and efficient way of avoiding repeated email updates. Unfortunately, a growing percentage of my email inbox now consists of colleagues pleading with me to update my bit of Google Docs.)

Breton says that most of Atos’s young staff didn’t use email before they joined the company. It’s true that email use has dropped significantly among teenagers, but it rises when they join the workforce and find themselves in front of an office computer that won’t let them into any but a handful of approved sites, none of which is Facebook.

There are three billion email accounts globally, estimated to rise to 3.8 billion by 2014. A quarter are corporate accounts, the rest private. In the flat language of statistics, there are 1.6 accounts per user. Someone complained recently that they have five email addresses for me, a hangover from the promiscuity of pre-Gmail days. Yet, as I’ve shed three of those email accounts over time, I’ve gained a Twitter account, a Facebook page, an internal messaging address at work, and ever-expanding text bundles.

All the while, messages are chasing me down, hunting, determined not to be allowed to languish. It would be wrong to say that this is the first generation to have several conversations at the same time – that arrived with writing – but the difference now is that we can have several conversations, across several continents, almost instantaneously. The big drive now is towards removing anything “almost” about it.

Here’s Breton again, explaining his solution to internal email: “When we don’t have internal email any more we will have fantastic new tools: a cloud-computing environment, social networks, instant messaging, microblogging, document sharing, knowledge community. These offer a much better approach for an information-technology company.”

All of which sounds like email in fancy dress.

Incredibly, email turned 40 this year. The one-size-fits-all system we take for granted only developed in its postadolescence. Before that there were different systems that didn’t talk to each other very well. In a way, we’re now returning to that landscape.

And for all that some innovations will make delivery more direct, efficient and instant, it won’t stop us being snowed under by messages. There could soon be a nostalgia for the simplicity and utility of email. Then again, it’s only the difference between being clobbered by one avalanche and being clobbered by several at a time.

shegarty@irishtimes.com

Twitter: @shanehegarty