The Death of Email?

Posted by Alex Twinomugisha on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 8:20am.

A few weeks ago, I was watching CNN on the Television when I came across a short segment on the future of email or more specifically, the death of email. Several experts interviewed were of the view that email is definitely on its death bed. Instead, the experts claim that the younger generation has eschewed email in favour of social networking applications like Facebook, Twitter and Instant Messaging (IM). Apparently, Yahoo and Hotmail are attracting fewer new (younger) users. This death-of-email prophecy is nothing new- it has been pronounced several times over the last few years by technology experts mainly in the United States. As a near email addict, I have always thought these experts delusional. As far as I was concerned, email was here to stay. I mean, I have friends all over the world that I went to university with and we have kept a very active mailing list for the last 10 years or so and the list only grows more active by the day. This is how I follow social changes among my friends- weddings, births, deaths, separations and everything else. At the office, I send and receive several tens if not hundreds of messages every day. I get agitated and lost, literally, when I cannot access my email for a few hours. So I don’t see how I could live without email.

But some deep pondering after that CNN programme and I am not so sure anymore. Let’s just say that I wouldn’t stand up for email in court after this. Let me use a recent personal experience I reflected on to illustrate why email may be on the way out. A few weeks earlier on my birthday, I realized that for the first time since I started using email regularly 12 or so years ago, I didn’t receive a single email message concerning my birthday. Instead, I received several Facebook posts, some Instant Messages (IM) through Google Talk and Yahoo and numerous SMS messages on my mobile phone. Interestingly, even my friends with whom I share an active mailing list didn’t send a single email, instead sending me Facebook messages. But perhaps this is not very surprising. After all, we increasingly use birthday reminders on Facebook and on our mobile phones’ calendar so it follows that we shall use these same tools when we receive these reminders. Pondering further, I came to the realization that I had actually stopped craving email access during weekends, holidays or when I travel. I hadn’t stopped craving for news and information though, it’s just that if there was anything urgent or interesting happening, I knew that somebody (friend or colleague) would SMS or call me on my mobile phone. So, it seems that along the way I have overcome my email addiction! But what does all this mean for Africa?

For starters, email never really took off in Africa outside the formal (large) business, civil society (or Non Governmental Organization -NGO) and university sectors. In the developed world, email was born in the universities and grew up in the corporate world. Similarly for Africa, email was born in the in the early to mid nineties but it is really the NGOs that took to the technology like ducks to water. Perhaps this was because it is the simplest, cheapest and sometimes only way to communicate with their funders in the West. My experience with private businesses is that very few really use email regularly, outside those operating in the technology sector or the large multinationals whole email systems are imposed from headquarters in the developed world. Governments in Africa, outside perhaps South Africa, are in many cases strangers to email except for a few officials (who, in my experience, have to deal with foreign aid donors). So why didn’t email take off in Africa like it did in Europe, Asia and North America? An obvious answer has to do with the low penetration of computers and the Internet in Africa. But I suspect that part of the answer lies with the way African economies are structured. In Africa, unlike the more developed world, the majority of the population is involved in the more informal or subsistence economy. So while in the more developed world, email usage was driven by the large developed formal enterprises, their absence in Africa might, corollary, be partially responsible for the low uptake of email.

One thing that has always puzzled me is that even where email is used regularly, African businesses, governments, universities and NGOs are more likely to use Yahoo, Google or Hotmail accounts than institutional ( such as email@institutionXYZ.com) accounts. It is a bit disconcerting to realize that a government minister’s or a university Rector’s business card spots a Yahoo email address as the “official” email address! Why this state of affairs? While most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer free email accounts on subscription, there are not many people using this service and I suspect this is due to reliability issues. Perhaps the problem lies with the lack of many large formal enterprises as postulated above. Or the lack of enough qualified engineers and computer scientists to manage institutional email systems in Africa hinders the establishment of these institutional systems. Or there is no demand for institutional email systems because there is no clear need for email (which cannot be wholly true because of the prevalence of “official” Yahoo addresses). Or the older generation of managers are technology illiterate and therefore have not demanded for these technologies. But what about those institutions, like universities, for whom email should be a life line? One would expect that these institutions would have institutional email systems but they almost all rely on Yahoo and Hotmail. For years, there has been a debate within the academic (university and research) community about how Yahoo and Hotmail email accounts were hogging their precious bandwidth because the students and lecturers opted to use Yahoo rather than the local university email system. With the average African university having the same bandwidth or connection speed as a typical household broadband connection in the US or Europe and paying 50 times or more for this connection, email systems that require browsing (and using the scarce internet bandwidth) were clearly not ideal. What they wouldn’t admit was that this state of affairs was caused by the lack of a reliable email system on campus which might in turn be linked to a lack of skilled personnel to set up, manage and maintain these systems. And so this problem still persists in these institutions.

On the individual front, I suspect that very few Africans use email or have an email account outside those in formal employment. One notable exception (which was surprising to me but shouldn’t really on reflection) is the curio sellers or those directly involved in serving tourists. Walk around these tourist stalls in Nairobi or Dakar and the curio sellers chasing after you are likely to beg you to take their business cards, complete with email address, in case you change your mind. In general, the low usage of email is compounded by the lack of access to computers and the internet. But what about the thousands of Internet or Cyber Cafes and other public access centres dotting Africa’s landscape? If email is an efficient and effective communication tool, why didn’t it take off? Perhaps the use of email requires that one know how to use a computer and the limited computer literacy is responsible for low uptake of email. So where does that leave the future of email in Africa? Clearly, the younger generation, at least in the cities, is getting hooked to Facebook and IM through internet enabled handsets. But the application of choice, the killer application for Africa, is SMS. SMS is instantaneous, reliable, widely available and is considered cheap (although I don’t necessarily believe that SMS is cheap!). SMS also has a very low learning curve compared say to email. But SMS cannot be used for large written tracts. But I don’t think that this means that email is here to stay.

On further reflection, I realize that the organization I work for is slowly moving away from almost complete reliance on email to embrace more use of social networking tools, journals, blogs and collaborative tools like Wikis. I suspect that this shift is also a reflection of the way we work- an emerging emphasis on collaboration over communication. Today, email is not even considered great for communication with the rise of applications like Twitter, let alone for collaboration. If the future is about closer collaboration in the formal and informal workplace, then email may have less of a role to play. For Africa, email never really took off and probably never will. With the rapid convergence of internet and mobile phone technologies, I foresee a future where anybody with a mobile phone will be able to communication and collaborate with anybody else sans email. As for keeping in touch with friends and family and for other social uses, email is clearly a technology of last resort, in other words dying fast.

The future is coming sooner than we can imagine. Recall that CNN “scoop” on the last US Presidential election night- the famous hologram? Or the increasing use of Cisco’s TelePresence which is a souped up life-like videoconferencing system. Well, with mobile phones increasingly shipping with high quality video cameras and increasing network bandwidth, video messaging (already available in some countries like Japan) or video-conferencing-like applications on mobile phones are not far off for Africa. After all, African mobile carriers already enjoy a slight edge- having newer network infrastructure with enhanced capabilities and less legacy issues to deal with and a highly social customer base. I believe that these video communication and collaboration applications will sell like hot cakes in Africa. Sounds like some Sci-Fi setting? Yes but then the future is going to be stranger than fiction.