The Many Faces of Email

As a person that grew up during the evolution of modern technology, I’ve seen people use technology and even used them myself. Now as an 18 year old college student my life has become partially dependent of these technologies.  The one that has played the biggest role in my life is E-mail. This one technology manage to simplify my life and workload as I first started to use it but as time has gone one the thing that simplified my life slowly started to complicate it.

The AOL man

I was first introduced to this communication technology though my parents who used it for work; this was when I was about 12. At that time this technology had little to no direct effect on my life. When I turned 16 however that all changed I received a job and Chicken and Chops LLC as a cook also at this time I received my own Aol email account.  At my new job I started out as just a cook but by the third month on the job I started to receive task of an assistant manager.  I then started to use email to contact the restaurants food providers making and confirming orders. It simplified my life because I went from doing messy kitchen work to simple light management work. 

Then email reached my personal life. I would email friends and instead of having to find a meeting place to work on a group project we would just email and send the file back and for the with different corrections that we made. It made group work simple then my high school English teacher then started to have us submit our papers electronically that way she could grade on her computer.

Not long after this, the negative side of this great technology started to show itself.  My email account quickly filled with spam and junk mail sometimes causing me to over look important emails that were about work or school work and grades. The biggest complication that this technology brought to my life is my grades; teachers were no longer burdened by having to walk to the main office to call parents.  Now any bad grade whether it is for a work sheet or a test was sent via email to my parents.  At work deadlines for orders that sometimes were mailed were shorted removing the time allotted for postal service and forcing the use of email.

Not much has changed since then, email still plays a big role in my current life though both school and work, but both the simplification and complication sides of this great technology are still presented every day which makes me question; is this technology is worth putting up with its dual sided personality or would it be better if we took a step back and did without?