Am I the only one still using email instead of WhatsApp? Perhaps so. I find it ever harder to persuade my contacts — and more vexingly, my friends — to use email for important messages instead of interrupting me with the ping of an instant message. And my failure to persuade others is a problem, because communication is a two-way street. Your choices affect my life, and sending instant messages that should have been emails is like snacking on chocolate bars and then expecting me to clear up the discarded wrappers.
Email is flawed, to be sure — many emails should have been a conversation. And if a message is either urgent or utterly disposable, then instant messaging is fine. But as a serious tool for important communication, email remains underrated.
First, it’s asynchronous. We don’t live in the 1990s any more, so email doesn’t beep for attention. The understanding is that if you send an email I will respond at a time that is convenient to me. Instant messages ping because — well, instant, right? And while I could switch off the needy noises from text or WhatsApp or almost anything, that would mean stripping the technology of a genuine use case in order to deflect some of the annoyance of people misusing it.
Second, email contains its own written record. You can check back, remind yourself of details and read old attachments. It is easy to file or to tag. Admittedly, some instant-message platforms have a way to search for old messages — if you can remember which platform they were sent on. But as a retrievable record of communication it’s hard to beat email.
(Reasons one and two explain why my wife and I will often send emails to each other across the room. It’s not sociopathy; sometimes it’s useful to provide notes and links for something we need to discuss, and it’s always considerate not to interrupt someone who is busy.)
Third, my computer has a keyboard and my phone doesn’t. Yes, I could install WhatsApp on a personal computer, but even if WhatsApp was well reviewed on Windows (it isn’t), I wouldn’t want to. It would be just another source of interruptions.
Fourth, it’s easy to organise email visually. When I check my email, I see four folders: an inbox, a “to do” list, a “to read” list and a “waiting for” list. When I check WhatsApp, I mostly see emojis. I am told that Snapchat is even worse.
Fifth, it’s much easier to customise the way email works — you can schedule future messages and set up filters, auto-replies and templates with chunks of text you regularly need to use. You can turn emails into calendar appointments with a click or two. Some instant-messaging apps offer some of this functionality, but all of it is commonplace on email, most of it for decades.
Finally, there is the enshittification problem: many instant-messaging platforms have an owner with market power and an ever-present temptation to degrade the user experience in pursuit of profit. If you don’t like WhatsApp and would rather use Signal, you need to persuade your friends to embrace the new platform. This co-ordination problem gives WhatsApp’s owner Meta considerable leeway to make your life worse before you get round to leaving.
In contrast, nobody owns email: it’s an open standard. You may be relying on Big Tech to provide your Outlook or Gmail account, but you can switch easily if you don’t like it any more. Nothing stops you sending messages from one email provider to another, so when you switch you don’t need to persuade your friends to switch with you. This power of exit is easy to take for granted — until you need it.
Of course, there are sometimes good reasons to use instant-messaging platforms. Their encryption is usually better than email; they handle photographs better; they can be fun for quick, disposable sharing of jokes or co-ordinating where to meet for a drink.
But that’s not why so many people are sending texts that should have been emails. The attraction of instant messaging is selfish. Messages are designed to interrupt the person to whom they are sent. HEY, STOP! LOOK AT THIS!
If your message demands that sort of immediate attention, fine. That is why they call it “instant”. But many instant messages don’t — they’re just inconsiderate interruptions. And because instant-messaging apps don’t have a proper inbox, they’re inconsiderate interruptions that can easily slip out of sight.
When the message is important but not urgent (that is, when the message should have been an email), then you’re implicitly requiring the recipient to set aside their priorities immediately to respond to yours — at the very least, making a note to themselves to deal with your interruption later.
Cory Doctorow — the author of Enshittification and an email power user, captured how this feels in a recent essay: “getting an IM mid-flow is like someone walking up to a juggler who’s working on a live chainsaw, a bowling ball and a machete, and tossing him a watermelon while shouting, ‘Hey, catch this!’”
I find this watermelon toss infuriating. Life presents us with enough incoming watermelons already; we don’t need people throwing them at us out of simple thoughtlessness.
In examining my own rage, I think I’ve come to understand why I find this behaviour so upsetting. I object to being dragged into a mess of other people’s making. The digital world is full of what are euphemistically termed “walled gardens”, a term which conjures an image of a sheltered oasis, but in reality means a cross between a doggy toilet and a prison camp. That would be fine if I could stay outside on the open internet, but my friends and colleagues keep insisting that they’re having a picnic in the garden and they would be so delighted if I’d show up.
Whenever I receive an instant message that should have been an email, I assume the worst: the person who sent it did so because they lost control of their email. Their inbox is overflowing; the searchable, fileable history of communications is no longer an asset but a guilty burden; they don’t trust themselves to reliably deal with an email, and so they don’t trust me either.
In other words, their email game is so weak that they might as well be flinging WhatsApps. And that drags me into their chaotic, goldfish-memory world.
Did I say that all these instant messages were like asking me to pick up your discarded chocolate wrappers? Let me change the simile. Your instant messages are like you eating the cheeseburger, while I have the heart attack.
Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram