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Hypothetical Death Match - E-mail vs. the Web

Posted by Zonk on Fri Sep 15, 2006 08:21 PM
from the two-techs-enter-one-tech-leaves dept.
The Internet Communications
netbuzz writes "If you had no choice but to choose, which would you give up: access to e-mail or the Web? Both still exist, just not for you. Read how others are defending their decisions — and how a few just refuse to choose." From the article: "From Stewart Deck: 'The Web has become intertwined into so much that I do and so much that I want to know and learn about that without it I might as well move to a grass hut in Irkutsk. The Web brings me closer to words, thoughts and ideas far beyond my geographical boundaries. I use it for information, education, insight, entertainment, EVERYTHING. ... I certainly enjoy the convenience of e-mail but I think I could put together work-arounds that would hold up reasonably well in its absence.'"
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  • Decisions, decisions... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MrNaz (730548) * on Friday September 15 2006, @08:23PM (#16118243) Homepage

    Bob's sweating brow arched over the red buttons. Intensely aware of the large calibre handgun just behind his ear and the maniac holding it who was now forcing him to choose which button to press, he was unable to decide whether to remove email or web access from his life. His pleadings to the madman had been to no avail, it had come down to choosing. His hand strained, hovering over the fateful buttons, veins bulging under the skin as his blood pressure rose and his body temperature boiled his brain. The pain of impending loss was too great, made all the more horrible by the knowledge that it would be done by his own hand.

    "Hurry up!" Snapped the crazed madman from between rotten teeth and foul breath. "I ain't got all day!" As he prodded the gun forward, digging the heavy barrel into Bob's temple, Bob quivered in fear. He knew from watching Dirty Harry movies that a handgun like that would blow his head clean off, the brain matter he was so proud of scattered over the ground like so much wet, red confetti.

    Our geeky hero let out a strained whimper, a silent pleading for someone, anyone, to intervene and save him from this horrible choice. Simultaneous images of mailing lists and blogs swirled in his tortured mind. Finally, a decision took form. It took form with the certainty of the iceberg in front of the Titanic, and just like then, he came to the bitter conclusion that his fate was unavoidable.

    Slowly, he turned to the madman. The fear had given way to a stony resignation and determination. He looked the madman straight in the eye and said "Shoot me, asshole."

    • If you choose the web, you can access web-based email. If you choose email, you can have people email web pages to you.

      Personally, I'd choose the web. Email's just email, and I only get a few a day.
    • Dude!

      If there is ever a "best of" or "funniest of" for /. postings, yours would just _have_ to be in it! What a riot :)

      I am very glad I wasn't drinking anything or I'd have spat it all over my monitor.


    • Once Bob was done with his dramatic thrashing, flailing, sweating, and panic, the IT department decided for him: no email.


      One way or the other, Bob would be forced to speak to a human being.


      "Better unplug the fax machine, too."

  • The web (Score:5, Insightful)

    by free space (13714) on Friday September 15 2006, @08:25PM (#16118247)
    I'd rather have the world's largest public library than the world's largest postal service.

    Also, people can communicate by leaving post-it notes on books :)

    • I'll tell ya, I wouldn't cry a single tear if every interaction I had from now on was with a flesh-and-blood human being with no intervening wires or carrier waves (or pipes, or dumptrucks...whatever). I agree with your 'Web as library' analogy for the most part, but I can't help thinking that e-mail is the world's biggest post-office only because every 'letter' is written as if by a 5 year old in crayon. To say nothing of cell-phones, which, taken together with e-mail and IM, have completely and utterly d

  • Email just has to go (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Deltaspectre (796409) on Friday September 15 2006, @08:26PM (#16118258)
    I could live without email as it hasn't been hopelessly intertwined into my life.... yet. I could always set up a discussion board/similar on my website for people to post whatever they wanted to email me with. Oh! And then I could have a program automatically parse that. And to post my replies!

    Wait, what are we defining email as?

    • I Thought it Obvious (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Alaren (682568) on Friday September 15 2006, @08:35PM (#16118307) Homepage
      ...could always set up a discussion board/similar on my website for people to post whatever they wanted to email me with.

      That was my first thought. Then I read the article and laughed at how many people focused on what they needed more to do their job--the web or email.

      I don't really see the point of the exercise, particularly among an IT crowd... but it actually would be an interesting hypothetical in the "regular world." Most non-techies I know use the internet about 50% for email and 50% for "other," and "other" is often quite trivial. My grandmother sends urban legends and spiritual poems. My mother keeps in touch with friends and writing groups.

      Everything they do could very easily be duplicated in a forum or some such, but there's the tech split: the people who know how to set up their own domain and hosting and a forum or blog would choose differently than "the masses."

    • Somehow I doubt it. (Score:5, Funny)

      by MarkusQ (450076) on Friday September 15 2006, @08:45PM (#16118353) Journal
      My UID is prime... is yours?

      Somehow I doubt it. But I'm pretty sure it's expressible as the sum of two primes.

      And I'm positive that it's expressible as the product of twenty two or fewer primes.

      --MarkusQ

      P.S. And to answer the main question, I couldn't do without either. Just the thought of having all that productive time back gives me the heebie jeebies.

    • Screw both of them. Just give me telnet. I play MUDs, plus I can make 'telnet' clients that happen to understand both stmp and http...
    • Email was already facing a similar death from spam the same way that news groups went from being functional communities into spam infested deserts.

      With Email we at least saw this one coming and have pretty good methods of dealing with spam. (The next spam frontiers are blogs, IM & VOIP, but that can be dealt with easily too.)

      While this might sound a little FUDish. Email is already dying a slow death, communications tools like IM, blogging, voip and video conferencing are making Email feel impersonal an

  • The Internets and it's vast network of tubes is far superior to email. Porn is on the net, not in email.

    http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]
    • The Internets and it's vast network of tubes is far superior to email.

      Is it really superior to email??? I mean, it's certainly not a truck that you can just dump something on! My staff sent me an internet last week and I didn't get it until today!
  • Email. No thought required. I work in an office, and I get a ton of emails every day. Each one of them tends to cause work for me.

    If HTTP was blocked at work though, I'd be looking for another job pretty quick. Saying that, my new company recently decided that I must take lunch at 12pm rather than 1pm and that was enough for me to accept interviews at other companies.

  • One has a Replacement...One Doesn't... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Quaoar (614366) on Friday September 15 2006, @08:30PM (#16118277)
    If I want instant access to information, the web is my only choice.

    If I want to talk to someone, I can use this fancy technology that I like to call a "phone."

    The only people who I could see picking e-mail over the web are those who are either deaf or mute, or are so socially inept that they can't talk to people over the phone.
  • AS said, this should be easy. Think about the limitations of each of these. E-mail is a relatively unimportant medium as compared to the web I believe.. The web is so much more than that. If we didn't have e-mail, how many other ways are there that we could communicate?

    Shopping on the web, data we enter... the accessibility that it gives us in so many different things. Without e-mail we would find another way to communicate effectively. Without the web, life as we know it would change drastically.

    __________
    • btw, just as some mention about ways that we communicate without the internet:

      1. Messaging services
      2. VOIP
      3. Camera
      4. Blogging
      5. /.
      6. etc

      Don't get me wrong, e-mail is important... its one of the few mediums we have that can be both personal and impersonal, stored for short of long term, and each different thought line/send has its own subject line. However, with the web, there is the possibility of thinking up another method to accomplish this.
  • If I didn't have the web, I wouldn't have to put up with questions like this.
  • Seeing as email is the only way I know how to communicate and express my thoughts, I'd definitely sacrifice the entire WWW for it. Seriously though, what is this? The lines between the various types of communication are becoming so blurred that there is absolutely no reason to separate things out like this. Look at SMS and Gmail/Talk. The lines. Blurred!
    • Seeing as email is the only way I know how to communicate and express my thoughts...

      Thank you for communicating and expressing your thoughts on the web.
       
  • The virtual world been around for less than 50 years. I would prefer physical libraries that been around for thousands of years. Real books don't go out of style with the newest version of the hardware and/or software.
    • I _hate_ physical libraries. Using the web for research lets me speed things up by a ridiculous factor.

      When reading for entertainment, sure - books are fantastic. But for getting things done? Give me bits over atoms any day.
  • So we don't have e-mail? Like SMTP and MAP/POP got zapped overnight? No sweat, we still have Web-based services such as gmail.

    So what's that we need to decide again?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by nacturation (646836)
      So we don't have e-mail? Like SMTP and MAP/POP got zapped overnight? No sweat, we still have Web-based services such as gmail.

      Well, email is delivered to your gmail account via SMTP. Granted, this could be replaced with something else... eg: RSS feeds which contain messages signed to your public key or something to which you could subscribe, but as it stands your gmail account would grind to a halt without SMTP.
       
  • With all the spam and such (while it can be controled on an individual basis), email is going downhill. Soon enough it really won't be all that useful and will be replaced by alternatives (like IM, SMS, etc ). On the other hand, the web pushed is in a new age, where information is free. I honestly probably would probably be washing dishes at some restaurant instead of being a software architect, if I hadn't been able to suplement my education with the knowledge found on the web. So in my opinion, email can
    • it's instantaneous, it can be logged in and kept running in the background, it's method of delivery via popup windows is the ultimate lazy man's solution. no checking through web interfaces, no delays as your mail client periodically checks, all messages you miss are right on the desktop, and conversations happen live rather than by email tag.

      From an organizational standpoint it's even better.

      all messages from one person appear in one window (or tab in the case of some better clients), anything you get pop
      • Yes, I know. My main point was that in the real world, email is -already- getting useless, so we're already more and more doing without it. For the rest, I guess it depends. As long as other (unrelated) kinds of communications are allowed (like forums), and that data transfer is still possible (like the newish EDI network replacement...err...I forget the name, uses HTTP POST instead of proprietary network), and things like debit cards still work, and so on, email could go away. It hurts more without IM, tex
  • "Which contributes more to your daily productivity [or enjoyment of life]?" is a valid question.

    But you can't take away one or the other (especially just for me) without positing some random, strange change to the world. Why is it gone? Government intervention? Lunatic planting an email-controlled bomb in my head? Broken mouse preventing me from accessing that icon? Bizarre bug in IP routers worldwide?

    I gave up asking asking pointless what-if questions as a sophomore. Try rephrasing the question and you m
  • This is a little like saying: "If you had to give up either food or water which would you give up?" Gee, I can live a couple weeks longer without food than without water so I'll give up food!

    Okay, maybe that's a little melodramatic. This is a little like saying: "If you had to choose, would you give up buying food and only grow/raise your own or would you give up any form of transportation faster than a horse?"

    There's no point in even considering the question. As a practical matter, any civilization shift w

  • Geez, that's what I hate worst about geeks and the Internet. It's all abstractions from someone's parent's basement. I say we do it right this time. Let's have a real death match!

    Come on, Email. Everyone calls you the killer app, let's see what you can do. You gonna stand there and let the Web knock you into the corner, or are you gonna do something about it?

    And how about you, eh, Web? How 'bout you get off your bloated ass and start throwing some of that weight around? Or maybe you... can't? Wassamatte

  • Pah!

    Who needs email?

    Web gives you access to your blog!

    Blogging via email is called 'spamming'.

    (not that I am a blogger, in fact I find the blog phenomenon extremely lame... just saying; web obviously gives more and equivalent functionality).

  • Pitch email! then re-invent it and reap the profit (Score:3, Insightful)

    by plasmacutter (901737) on Friday September 15 2006, @09:01PM (#16118426) Journal
    yep.. since email is implemented via IP packets, you pitch it and straight away code the protocols for the exact same thing.

    patent it..

    give it away free to pro-gpl and anti-drm groups, and charge proprietary houses and DRM vendors through the nose for your fortune! : )

  • I want to say eMail... (Score:4, Funny)

    by ellem (147712) * <ellem52@gm a i l.com> on Friday September 15 2006, @09:05PM (#16118436) Homepage Journal
    but the prices on v1aGR4 are so good... and a really important person from Nigeria just sent me an offer you will all be jealous of... and besides I don't think the web has all these .scr files I get.
  • This is kind of a very theortic exercise, since the web isn't really something clearly defined, neither is email. If we close up the SMTP/POP/IMAP ports there is still all that webmail around, instant messaging, IRC and stuff. Ok, so lets count them all as email, but what about blogs or forums? You can't close them without closing one of the most important aspects of the web, namely that you are not limited to being a consumer, but also can easily become a producer of content. Last not least you could also

  • If all I had was e-mail, how would I get people's e-mail addresses? For my current friends and family, I either already have them, or I ask them. All the other e-mail addresses I have come off the Web. Without web, new contacts would be established as they were in pre-internet days. I'd have to find out about clubs, social groups, etc. by reading printed newspapers, attending their meetings, and striking up conversations with people who gave me their business cards. Very ineficient!

    With just Web and

  • Would you give up liquids or solids?

    Maybe, just maybe, those who refused to choose were simply telling the pollster to fuck off?
  • If I had either SMTP or HTTP it would take me no more than a few days to get the other, and that's if I had to write the proxy myself, using nothing but an Apple ][ and a 300 baud modem. In Forth. Without a language card. On a MONOCHROME monitor. Uphill. In the snow. Both ways.

    How about Usenet? Do I get NNTP? Gopher? FTP? Telnet? UUCP?

    Christ, what a STUPID question.
  • For a moment, let's look below the layers of abstraction and ask ourselves...

    At its' core, what is email?

    It is an application using a protocol that allows for the two-way transfer of ASCII text files. There is hardly a single transfer protocol in existence on the Internet (in fact if there is one, I don't know about it) that does not allow the same. Granted, not all of them *deliver* said text in exactly the same way, but that's because many of them were primarily designed to do other things...but when you

    • Random ruminations... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kebes (861706) on Friday September 15 2006, @08:42PM (#16118338) Journal
      As you, my first thought was "what about webmail?"... however the article says:

      This is an academic exercise (obviously) so there will be no cheating allowed. No IM, text messaging or Web mail to substitute for e-mail.

      I'm not sure why IM is considered cheating if you give up on email. (You can't IM someone you don't know out of the blue; most companies don't have IM addresses listed, etc.) If IM is 'cheating' then isn't the telephone cheating, too? What about IRC? Is that cheating?

      As the author says it's purely academic. My problem with these 'what-ifs' is that because they are unusual, the only way to give a sensible answer is to know all the extraneous details that are left to the imagination. What are the repercussions of breaking the rule? What are the limitations? What are the rules? Is it cheating to put up messages on forum, then phone your friends and tell them to go reply? On the flip side, it's probably cheating to email people and ask "can you do a google search and tell me..." but is it cheating if you just email them the question? In this day and age, if you ask someone a question, they'll start with a web-search anyways.

      If I had to decide, I'd also select the web. Email is one of many communication modes available today (and its functionality is easily emulated elsehow), but when it comes to information collection/dissemination, the web is really unique.
      • If I had to decide, I'd also select the web. Email is one of many communication modes available today (and its functionality is easily emulated elsehow), but when it comes to information collection/dissemination, the web is really unique.

        What is the difference between an http: and a mailto: in the scheme of things?

        A Wiki [wikipedia.org] can be used for email-like communications. What is the difference from PHPboard forum websites and google groups (besides SPAM, pr0n and security vulnerabilities?) Heck, the customer comm
      • I think the way to think of the problem is as follows.

        Today, you use email exclusively for some purposes. Now be imaginitive here, you don't respond to your boss' group email with an IM to your boss and 15 coworkers, and you sometimes use email because it is late in the evening etc. The no email question is "Imagine you could no longer use the internet for those purposes." Don't be creative and inventive and come up with alternatives, you just can't use the internet for it any more.

        Same thing with the we

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by orangesquid (79734)
      You can duplicate the functionality of email with the web (and maybe the other way around), but, what if you don't?

      What if it's broken down to this: do you want the ability to communicate with other human beings only, or the ability to obtain information from computer databases only?

      Perhaps that's more of where the question was aiming...
    • Increase your manhood!
      Make them beg for your member!
      Horny Housewife wants it up the wazoo!
      Cum for hours and hours!
      I'm available tonight!
      Aphid future peach wheel map

      Yeah... Spam sucks... I'll stick with the Internet! Way Better pron than eMail.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by kv9 (697238)
      the web is also, to use your own words, "a subset of the internet". rtfa/blurb again.
    • The question was not "the internet", by which I would understand IP + the actual physical network, but "the web", that is, the complicated graph with individual pages (things you can view in a browser) connected by hyperlinks (things you can click on in a browser to view something else). I use the loose definitions for pages and hyperlinks because AJAX and similar tricks complicate things as compared to a static web.

      You can have either the web or email without the internet. You could send handwritten st

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