Good vs Email. You need Harry Potter for this

Revised 20 July 0507 hours Manila time

GOOD VS EVIL. I love it! Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the 6th in the series, has been commended by the Vatican who said that Harry Potter ´gets the whole good-vs-evil-battle-for-the-soul-of-mankind debate just right this time around´ (Alex Koppelman, 15 July 2009, salon.com). And the moviegoers all around the world seem to agree: They have made this #6 movie the #1 Harry Potter film of all, raking in US$104 million in its first day of showing worldwide (radaronline.com). In fact, the film has scored the biggest midnight gross of all time in the US with $22 million at 1201 hours 15 July (Pamela McClintock, variety.com). Carry on, Harry!

That´s my metaphor for the Muggles´ battle between good and bad email. Because, just like the Vatican, it is only now that I have appreciated that with the email, just like Harry Potter, the debate must be clearly around good vs evil.

Just as the background of the evil Lord Voldemort was vague to Harry Potter, so to me the backgrounds of the Internet, World Wide Web and email. Up until this morning of 18 July 2009, Saturday Manila time, I thought they were the same banana, same species but different names. I´ve been using the personal computer for 24 years and been earnestly into the Internet for the last 5 years, reading and doing and trying to understand, but I myself wasn´t clear about them. Is the Internet the same as the WWW? Where does the email stand in the scheme of things?

I don´t know about you, but that is important for me to know because I like, in fact I insist on looking at parts and, perchance, how they relate to wholes. In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, memories of the past become a necessary part of the present that must be made whole. With that in mind, from my WWW readings just today, I have learned these: (1) The Internet is the international network of network of computers around the world – inter-network, a network of networks; ´a matrix of networks that connect computers around the world (American Heritage Dictionary). (2) The World Wide Web is the network of files residing on servers around the world; the files, called Web pages, can be accessed by browsers such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. (3) The email is the message sent and received by people anywhere in the world.

Is that clear? Not to me! I have to, I want to simplify it. So, after some thinking, I say the Internet is both the hardware (the network of network of computers) and the software (the programs that allow the PCs to talk to each other, that is, to network). The Internet is also the knowledge exchanged. Not only that; when you switch on your PC and connect to the Internet, you become part of the Internet. Of course, there is no Internet without Internet users.

Now, the World Wide Web of knowledge cannot be accessed except through the Internet. So, since we cannot separate the Web from the Internet, the Web is actually part of the Internet, part of the software. You cannot separate Harry Potter from his wizarding powers. And since today we also cannot separate the email from the Internet, it is best to consider the email as actually part of the Internet, part of the software. So, for practical purposes, it is correct to equate the Internet often with the World Wide Web and, occasionally, with the email.

In another perspective, the Web and email are uses of the Internet. That is to say, there can be invented other uses of the Internet. The uses of the Internet can be improved upon, or added to. For instance, arising from its phenomenal success, YouTube as a volunteer video display website can be considered a significant and different use of the Internet. The Katrina Halili-Hayden Kho video scandal is proof of the power of YouTube (see my ´Hayden Kho Vadis?´ americanchronicle.com). For a metaphor, the Internet can be likened to Microsoft Windows, and it can accept applications other than the Office Suite 2003 (which only happens to be my favorite). Twitter is yet another such use of the Internet – to find out, I just registered a minute ago – it's your free call anywhere in the world, and a million people use it (techcrunch.com). (It's becoming popular; if you like chatter – I don't – it's for you.)

If the essence of Harry Potter is access to power, and the essence of the Web is access to knowledge, what is the essence of the email? As I see it, the essence of the email is access to people – family, relatives, friends, acquaintances, unknowns. Such access to knowledge is indirect and static; such access to people is direct and essentially dynamic, and therefore extra care must be taken.

What I´m trying to say is that the email is both the medium and the message – the medium because it transmits the message, as well as it is the message because it transmits meaning, both intended and unintended. We have to watch out when we send email.

From the tens of thousands of emails that I have read – in my Gmail mailbox alone, more than 20,000 messages stored since 2005, including those of my own sending –requiring storage of 4.8 GB total, in Gmail´s servers, not my hard disk – we have so far ignored the fact that it is essentially a letter from me to you and, therefore, between civilized people, the email must embody civilized communication.

What I mean is that, with all the electronic software available on CDs, DVDs and office suites such as those of Microsoft and OpenOffice, not to mention the Internet, I see no reason for any email to contain bad spellings and badder grammar. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil cannot apply to Lord Voldemort as it cannot to the email.

Certainly, as long as I pay attention, Gmail helps me check my spelling, if that is all I´m worried about. That´s good for short messages, fragments. But when I want to be sure about my grammar, I type the message in Word 2003 first, and I get all the help I need, as this high-end word processing program has a very valuable Spelling and a Grammar Checker that is mostly accurate (I sometimes disagree with its analysis of my sentence structure).

Not only that my email should be letter-perfect and good-looking grammatically, but it must also follow the rules of communication. At the very least, it must follow the 4 Cs of Communication, that is, it must be Clear (nothing is vague), Concise (it´s not too long), Coherent (thoughts flow smoothly), and Comprehensive (it covers all the basics, if not the bases).

It was computer engineer Ray Tomlinson who invented email in 1971 (Mary Bellis, inventors.about.com). In 1978, nobody was yet worrying about bad email, as JCR Licklider himself said (quoted by Bill Stewart, livinginternet.com), ´one could write tersely and type imperfectly, (yet) the recipient took no offense.´ You can forgive Licklider for saying that, as he was the Internet visionary, the one who foresaw the need for networked computers (Scott Griffin, ibiblio.org) and, therefore, is the Godfather of the Internet, I say. With all its faults then (and now), the email´s immense popularity ´made the Internet the global phenomenon that it is today (Geno Jezek, 2006, historyoftheinternet.info).

It was Tomlinson who invented the email address when he chose the symbol @ to indicate which computer the person was or would be ´sitting at´ at that time. Jezek says (as cited) by 1976, commercial email software began to appear and soon after that, 75% of the Arpanet traffic was email. He says it can be said that ´email took Arpanet to the next level – the Internet.´ Arpanet is the US Government´s project that became the Internet. Jezek doesn´t explain it, but Alan F Kay does in his encyclopedia article (alanfkay.com):

Simple message transmission/reception, which came to be known as email, was an incidental, minor but useful byproduct for government business (via the Arpanet, which became the Internet). ... That ´incidental´ email capability became the key factor of the Internet´s fabulous success. Compared to postal mail, telephone, fax, or any other way to get a message from point A to point B, nothing was as cheap as the essentially zero-cost email. In time, many people on limited budgets became Internet users, for its various advantages. ... The principal outcome of the presence of the Web was the conversion of users of email into customers for e-commerce. The presence of millions and tens of millions of Internet users produced a growth spurt for business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce.

I quote: 'The principal outcome of the presence of the Web was the conversion of users of email into customers for e-commerce.' I strongly disagree. The principal outcome of email is not e-commerce but exchange of data and information, let´s not forget that. The businessmen among us are only taking advantage of the opportunity, but they are not the main users of email; email was not invented for them, just like the letter was not invented for marketing.

In 2007, there was an estimated 1.2 billion email users (Radicati Group, 16 October 2007, software.tekrati.com) – that´s a lot of people talking to each other, which is what matters. An email is a letter, a sharing, a sales pitch, an argument, a plea, a remonstrance, even a lesson. No, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail – the ones I´m familiar with because I use them – they don´t teach you the etiquette of email, that it is more than just scribbled correspondence and must follow the rules of communication. In it you can see the classic communication model: Sender => Medium => Receiver. With all the electronic knowledge around us, there is no reason why our email must remain rudimentary, rude and rules-free.