<nettime> interview with Steve Dorner about email 'as such'

[Ted Byfield <tedbyfield@gmail.com>]

Something I just read that seems relevant to questions about nettime's relevance, reach, prospect, etc. Thanks to Keith Dawson (@kdawson@tldr.nettime.org) for the pointer.

Below is an excerpt from an interview with Steve Dorner, who developed Eudora all those many years ago, talking about how attitudes toward email have changed over the years. This is a subject that people have talked about endlessly, often with a mix of

	- precarity (e.g., feeling personally overwhelmed by work)

	- generational change (e.g., 'kids hate email')

	- anti-corporatism (e.g., 'Gmail,' 'Facebook,' etc)

That's not to say those issues are false — on the contrary. But Dorner adds a surprise to the mix when he points at a shift from, basically, textuality to visuality:

> Is it wildly ironic that even Steve Dorner cannot run Eudora anymore?
>
> “Um.... no, it’s not, and the reason it’s not is people developed this feeling that E‑mail was a burden. And a lot of the sort of later development of Eudora was all about harm reduction, really. It was about trying to get rid of the incredible volume of spam... And, you know, people increasingly didn’t want to put in the time to sort things themselves, to manage things, to learn anything. They just wanted it all to be what they wanted without them having any hands-on.” Whereas Eudora defaults to showing you everything, letting you choose how to proceed.
>
> He says an Apple employee told him the war is over and the visual designers won. So everything inside Apple is about visual design. The implication is if it looks good it really doesn’t matter how it works. This guy also said Job 1 for any engineer was to reduce the number of support calls.
>
> “You see, what’s ironic, Joe, is that essentially I don’t miss Eudora, in part because my E‑mail life is very uncomplicated at the moment because I’m not working, and if you’re not working, E‑mail is just a transport for advertising and transacting a little bit of business.

	https://blog.fawny.org/2015/07/04/stevedorner/

This is hardly radical or new — I'm sure there are earlier earlier variations on this in Steven Johnson's _Interface Culture_ (1997) or Alex Galloways's Interface Effect (2012), for example. But I think this might shed some useful light as we think about where nettime is headed. — less a 'mailing list' than a ~community committed to textuality. That invites questions about how it could be developed — as its founding statement says, "not just a mailing list but an effort to formulate an international, networked discourse."

Cheers,
Ted
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