In For Email Newsletters, a Death Greatly Exaggerated, David Carr of the New York Times writes about the resilience of email as a means of communication. Carr writes:
An email newsletter generally shows up in your inbox because you asked for it and it includes links to content you have deemed relevant. In other words, it’s important content you want in list form, which seems like a suddenly modern approach…
It makes sense. My personal digital hierarchy, which I assume is fairly common, goes like this: email first, because it is for and about me; social media next, because it is for and about me, my friends and professional peers; and finally, there is the anarchy of the web, which is about, well, everything.
The article concludes with this observation of Jason Hirschhorn, the chief executive of the digital curator ReDef,
[Email is] a great place to get in front of people who are interested in what you have to say. Email is a 40-year-old technology that is not going away for very good reasons — it’s the cockroach of the Internet.
