Riccardo Mori

I collaborate with the Italian edition of iCreate magazine, and among other things, I write a column called Appunti (in English, it would be Clipboard). I’ve been receiving some emails, recently, written by intelligent interlocutors who wanted to know more about me and with a couple of them I had the pleasure to engage in a bit of email back-and-forth. You know, a good old written correspondence, a conversation.

At one point, since we were talking about social networks, one of them asked me which social communication medium I find most effective.

I replied: email.

Although I could not see his face, it was clear by the way he reacted that my answer had taken him aback. In his response, he asked me if I was just being provocative for the sake of it. No, I was not and am not. I already gave him a more detailed answer, but I thought it was worth writing about that here as well.

In recent times, email has become the main complaint from many tech bloggers. Some declared email bankruptcy, some stated that email as a medium is broken, not aging well and needs an overhaul, a complete rethinking, and so on and so forth. But I agree with Khoi Vinh, who wrote, back in September:

Don’t Break What’s Not Broken

In spite of that, I still think email works better than just about any other communication medium out there. It’s not just that it’s ubiquitous and universally understood; or that I fully own my email address and its domain; or that I can access my email from any number of clients, desktop or Web or mobile or tablet; or that I really can answer it in my own sweet time. For me, the bottom line is that email works great. I don’t have any serious trouble keeping up with it and, so long as I’m not working with insane people who send poisonous diatribes over email, I kind of enjoy it.

Email is not broken, if you ask me. It could be better, for sure, but I don’t think it requires the drastic changes that so many other people seem to believe are necessary. And I certainly don’t need messaging intermediaries entering the picture. These alternatives just fracture what is for me a pretty well consolidated experience — if you want to reach me, my email address is pretty easy to find and I, in turn, know the one place I should turn to check to see if you’ve reached me.

When I say that email is, for me, the most effective means to a social network, the first obvious objection people make is that there are other, more convenient platforms, and the usual suspects get promptly outlined: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, you name it. And perhaps it’s true, their interfaces are rather straightforward, you generally get the hang of them quickly, and they all give you a certain reach. This last aspect is key. All these social networks are horizontal. They are like enormous places to hang where each user has their own place to broadcast their persona, their views, the things they share, etc. to the Internet wilderness, and other people may decide to form aggregates around this user, for the most varied reasons: they know him/her in real life, they know him/her from other forums, they recognise him/her as that guy/girl with that interesting blog or podcast, they don’t know him/her but like the style and the way he/she broadcasts his/her opinions, and so on.

Meaningful things can develop from this kind of interaction, I won’t deny that also because it would contradict my own experience, but with people you had no previous knowledge of (most of your ‘followers’), the depth of your connection and interaction is usually shallow. Sometimes on Twitter I have the distinct feeling it’s like entering a very crowded pub filled with people you half-know, and while you’re making your way to the counter, you overhear interchanges and bits of conversations that briefly catch your interest and you stop for a little while to add your quick observations on the matter.

Facebook, Twitter, Google+ et al., all have mechanisms to focus on deeper, more private exchanges, but at that point they’re no better than the good old email.

Email is vertical. There is no broadcast, no egotism. But there can be good, private, deep conversations. Even among a small group of people. I have had intense email correspondences over the years. I have used email to build projects, to arrange meetings and outings, to send notifications… To communicate in what I think has been an effective manner.

Email today is perceived as ‘problematic’ because it isn’t felt as being convenient or ‘fast’ as other social media. The cynic in me thinks that people are more interested in other social media exactly because they provide the means to broadcast their selves more publicly and more conveniently, and to engage in shallower interactions since, you know, we’re all living busy lives and can’t be bothered to form really deep, meaningful interactions (or friendships altogether) with people who live so far away. Under this light, social networks are more like ‘individualistic networks in a shared virtual place’.

Back to my surprised interlocutor, I told him: the proof of email’s effectiveness is that we’re having this very exchange. You got in touch with me through the magazine and through my website. You showed up out of the blue, but writing thoughtful things in an elaborate, relaxed message. Email itself invited you to express yourself that way, without forcing constraints related to space or content. I chose to respond accordingly, and the conversation went on. Perhaps after this, we’ll never cross paths again, or perhaps we’ll contact each other in the future for one reason or another, but whatever the case, we’ve had this correspondence, which has been anything but superficial.

I know: email is not a social network platform, per se. And I know email alone doesn’t really have reach. The obvious advantage of the usual social networks is that you’re more exposed and ‘discoverable’, so it may be easier to find kindred spirits there. In fact, I’m not saying email should replace social networks, I’m simply advocating email as an effective and rather straightforward medium to communicate with other people on a deeper level than limiting yourself to ‘interactions’ through Twitter or Facebook or whatever. It takes a little effort from the parts involved, for sure, but in my experience that is often worthwhile and rewarding in the medium-long term.

First of all, I have a confession to make: for three months I haven’t been doing what I’ve often preached, backups. I have a backup of vital information and documents stored in the cloud, but I’ve been living dangerously for three months or so without a Time Machine backup of my main machine. The old external drive I used for that died around last September, so I went and bought a new one (1 TB, with FireWire 800) planning to split it in two partitions: one, to make a ‘snapshot’ of my Snow Leopard system when I would upgrade to Lion, so that I would be able to boot from it in case of problems with the new cat or for running the occasional application with PPC code. The other, larger, partition would be used for Time Machine backups. 

Then I got knee-deep in work and started postponing the backup… until the other day. Every time you have to begin from scratch with Time Machine (and with any other backup program/system) is a bit of a drag because the Mac has to copy all data to the backup drive. And since internal hard drives keep getting bigger, there’s an increasing amount of data to be copied, the majority of which are tiny files, and as any of you will surely have experienced, it takes longer to copy 50,000 2KB files than two 50MB files. Anyway, I was ‘lucky’ enough to only have 1,632,008 files for roughly 180GB of data, and when Time Machine started the process I was told by a little window in the Finder that it would take 5 hours. Since I wanted the Mac to be idle during the process, I started the backup just before going to bed, certain that the morning after all would be fine.

Not so. I had left only three applications running the night before: the Finder, System Preferences and Safari. When I sat again before my Mac, everything except Safari was non-responsive (you Alt-Tab to that application and the cursor becomes a beach ball) and the Time Machine backup was hanging at 86GB copied (still almost 100GB to go). There was no activity from the external drive, so it was clear that the backup wouldn’t go anywhere from there. I had no other choice than to force-reset the Mac, wipe the partial backup and try the process once again, this time while keeping an eye on it. The frustrating thing being, of course, that I couldn’t do any work on the MacBook Pro (luckily there is an abundance of Macs in my studio, so I took the occasion to do some catching up of my RSS feeds on the Power Mac G4 Cube). 

After a short while, even this second backup attempt hanged. Perhaps it had something to do with Spotlight, deciding to reindex my whole world while Time Machine was trying to back it up. So: rinse and repeat. Third time’s the charm and finally, finally, 24 hours after the first attempt, I had a successful Time Machine backup. And this over FireWire 800. I don’t even want to imagine doing it on a Time Capsule, wirelessly. Now I’m pretty sure that my next hardware upgrade will involve a Thunderbolt-everywhere kind of policy.

Backing up is right. And wrong.

What happened with my unfortunate Time Machine session is probably an extreme case (or not, you’ll tell me), but while I was babysitting the second and third attempts, half-wasting my time (because I wasn’t completely idle, yet I couldn’t help checking up on the backup process from time to time), I kept thinking about today’s backup culture. And getting angry. 

The backup is something sensible and advisable to do on a practical level. There are important data (both personal and work-related) that you simply cannot afford to lose, so what do you do? You duplicate them on another drive, or even on another different medium. This isn’t a new strategy in the computing world, it’s basically as old as computer themselves. I remember visiting the data processing centre of the company my mother used to work for. It was 1986, I think, and they had these huge tape units whirring, constantly backing up essential information. At that time I was beginning to get acquainted with the backup process, and when I started working with Macs in 1989–1990, the agency I was collaborating with had most of its data on Bernoulli cartridges.

The philosophy was simple: you back data up so you end up with at least one more copy and you store it on a supposedly more reliable medium. At the time I remember backing stuff up from floppies to hard drives, and from hard drives to Bernoulli cartridges (or, later, SyQuest cartridges and other magneto-optical media).

And today… we do the same. For the same reasons. Not much has really changed in decades. Today’s storage media may be physically slimmer and hold tens of thousands of times the data a hard drive could hold in the 1980s, but the question of reliability still stands. We distrusts storage media no more no less than 30 years ago. And to protect the integrity of our data we still resort to old practices. In the end, the copying as an act of preservation is a centuries-old practice. But instead of working towards more reliable solutions to store our information (now I’m back in the computing context), we’ve just been perfecting the copy strategy. Which, as I said before, is good and all in practice, but on a theoretical, philosophical level it’s starting to feel wrong to me. It’s like with cars. Today we have wonderful cars: great design, great performance, great optimisation, and surely a 2011 car is safer, better, faster, more comfortable than a 1911 car. Yet what makes it move is basically the same stuff. A 2011 car without petrol is as fast and useful as a 1911 car. 

When I see concept videos about future interfaces, when I hear people constantly referring to a multi-touch interaction as it appeared on Minority Report, I’m actually more interested in storage solutions. What really fascinated me in Minority Report were those glass discs people used as a storage medium: they looked so visually pleasing and so reliable. That is something I’d love to be using in ten years or so. We should not, in 2011, be worrying about copying our stuff, redundantly, in many different places to store it securely. I know that it’s easy to do, that devices are cheap, that it can be a fully automated process without the user even noticing, etc. But I think it should be something even more hassle-free. Of course I’m not expecting eternal lifetime from devices, but at least something much more durable. Like audio CDs one bought in 1988 and still play on a 2011 CD player. I’m sure that when you bought them you didn’t think “Oh now I have to do a backup because something might break down in a month and they might lose data in the process”. I just want the same thing for the data I have on my Macs. Enough with this ‘everything’s disposable’ culture. Our personal information simply deserves better, more reliable storage options.