With my last blog post, I talked about how using blogs and MeWe are an alternative to the big tech option of information suppression social media. This post I would like to add how Email is the original social media, and I make the argument how you could not have a world without Email.

Before blogs and social media, Email was used as early as 1972 and rapidly grew in popularity as computers became a common feature for consumers. Many of us, and I still do today, had several groups set up in our Email contacts who we share thread discussions back and forth. From this came the Email list providers, which allow us to broadcast our messages usually outbound, however the subscribers can reply privately if they choose to. And when I communicate to bloggers, we often are using Email to discuss truly important things that we wouldn’t say in public – or make plans – as not everything is in public.

Ask yourself how many times a day you check your Email account. Now compare that to the number of times you check your social networking account. With Email, you build a permission-based list of people that want to hear from you. Isn’t that what all of us do on a social media network (with a little difference in permissions, depending on what service we’re using).

Not only can Email be more secure when used properly, with social media your messages could pass by too quickly and disappear, or be suppressed, into the news feed before you even notice (this can now happen to your inbox unless you have the right webmail service). With Email, readers have to either open or delete the Email, and can save items in their inbox for further action, giving your emailed message more impact. Email may not have the buzz, but it still has a lot of power.

People also make the mistake that Facebook is the largest social network to date, in reality, the largest social networks are Email. That is if you agree if Facebook, as a private community of your friends, is a social network, then so is email. They both have the same requirements:

1) profiles (emails have signatures),
2) Ability to connect to each other (the act of Emailing, and often responding,
3) Do something useful (Email users share information, and sometimes collaborate).

Finally, Email is still a highly important mode of communication, while we often complain about keeping the inbox clean, research indicates people still trust Emails from friends and people they know – this will only continue as the Email address becomes more valuable than the phone number or street address.