EVERYONE has at least one: the e-mail you’ve sent and bitterly regretted.
The one to a female friend where sloppy typing announces “Hope you’re not busty“. The e-mail you sent on behalf of your boss to hundreds of staff that you’ve signed “Ms Bitch”, instead of Birch.
Another saying “your work is excrement” instead of “excellent“. Moments to make the toes curl and the face redden.
If there were only a way to make e-mail vanish, just go away, then many people would be so much happier for it.
Self-destructing e-mail is a gift to those who are naturally nervous at having their decisions scrutinised – which in the civil service is pretty much everyone.
The embarrassment you feel at your “reply all” e-mail, in which you insulted a colleague in front of the whole company, is nothing compared to that of a civil servant who has to justify what they wrote in an e-mail trail a year ago about an incoming minister.
For those who didn’t grow up with e-mail – that is, anyone over about 30 – composing a message always carries the faint belief that because it’s just electrons on a screen – somehow e-mail isn’t, well, real. Not real like a letter. Of course, you’d never write such things in a letter. But e-mail?
It’s always going missing, or being discarded as spam, isn’t it? It’s not there. Until it’s everywhere and your diary abruptly includes a disciplinary meeting.
But for many teenagers, the idea of sending e-mail at all is slightly strange; it’s the communications equivalent of suggesting that a band should release its next album on 78rpm shellac.
Today’s teenagers can barely recall a time before the smartphone, and apps afford them constant communication.
Sending a message that is formally divided into “From:”, “Subject:” and “Body:” and which might get waylaid seems bizarre.
Instead, teens prefer one-to-one or one-to-many systems, such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Apple’s iMessage, BlackBerry Messenger, and – if working in a forward-looking business – an app called Slack, which provides a place for all typed conversations to be collated.
Moreover, today’s teens think of the world as one where some of their life is lived in public, and other parts very much in private where throwaway remarks really do vanish into the ether.
That desire is best expressed by Snapchat, used daily by more than 100 million people to send each other photographs which then delete themselves unrecoverably within seconds of being opened.
Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s chief executive, tried to explain the rationale for his users’ love of the app in a video on Wednesday.
“Historically, photos have always been used to save really important memories, major life moments. But today . . . pictures are being used for talking.
“So when you see your children taking a zillion photos of things that you would never take a picture of, it’s because they’re using photographs to talk.
“And that’s why people are taking and sending so many pictures on Snapchat every day.”
The children who have grown up in an age of horrendous embarrassments caused by e-mail – such as the “hot girlfriend” e-mail from 2011, which went from e-mail to “viral” – are much more wary than their predecessors of leaving traces behind.
The truth is, we’re beginning to realise that we don’t necessarily want the internet to have recorded everything we did or said.
Self-destructing photos and the “right to be forgotten” (or at least, made harder to find through search engines) echoes our desire to make some mistakes in private. E-mail pretends to be private, but never quite goes away.
That’s because deleting e-mails hardly ever gets rid of them; like E.coli, they always live on somewhere.
What’s more, every e-mail that’s sent must be received, and vice-versa; which means that deleting them in one place isn’t enough. You have to delete them from the senders and receivers too – a dramatically bigger challenge.
– The Daily Telegraph