Digital Universe: The Global Telecommunication Revolution

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Critical Perspectives

E-mail and the Age of Interruption

The effects of Moore's law in creating ever more powerful information-processing and communication devices over the past half-century has led to a dramatic expansion of the use of these tools in daily life. Few of us living and working in the digital universe could contemplate daily life without our mobile phones, MP3 players, netbooks, and tablet computers. These devices have become ubiquitous and are now so commonplace that we pay little attention to their users – unless they bump into us while composing a text message. We no longer assume that a lone person walking along staring into space and having a loud conversation with an unseen person is mentally ill. He is merely using his mobile phone with a wireless headset. What is remarkable is the relatively rapid diffusion of mobile devices used in public places since 2001, and technology savants predict that the explosion in the number of mobile communication technologies will only increase in this century.

While these mobile telecommunication devices are highly visible, I would argue that other digital communication technologies have had an equal or greater effect on networked societies. Few have evolved as quickly or been as widely adopted in information-oriented societies as e-mail and its cousins texting and twittering.¹ While text messaging used to be the teenage communication ...