E-mail

E-mail is a form of new media that revolutionized the way people interacted. E-mail made it much easier and convenient for people to interact with one another. If we look back before e-mail, when you wanted to get in touch with a person who lived far away you would either have to call that person or write a letter, mail it, and wait for their response to arrive maybe even weeks later. With the invention of e-mail, now we can contact people all over the world in just a matter of seconds. With e-mail you just type what you want to say and it is only a click away from reaching the person on the receiving end, no matter how far away. In addition to just typing messages to one another, e-mail also allows people to easily share files such as photos, videos, and documents. E-mail is similar to regular mail, a much older form of communication, in the sense that you are still writing a message or choosing certain photos to send to other people, but with e-mail both of these functions become much easier to perform. E-mail also fits into all three different types of interactions we talked about in class: one-to-one, one-to-many, and even many-to-many. E-mail has become one of the major forms of communication today, used by everyone who has access to the Internet. If someone were to mention the idea of mail that could be sent and received within seconds to people living 100 years ago they would have thought it impossible, whereas people today would think it is impossible to live without it. It truly is amazing to see how far technology has come just in the past 100 years.