Thomas Erickson
snowfall@acm.org
My computer screen looks weirdly 'wrong,' as though some catastrophic
system or network failure has just occurred. Everything is really just fine,
but my reaction to what is really just an unusual state of affairs causes
me to pause, and reflect on the cause of my unease: My email in-box is entirely
empty.
The disconcertingly empty in-box hanging before me belongs to the Eudora
email program. Its emptiness is unusual because, like many people, I use
my in-box as a holding bin for messages that I want to be sure to read over
later, or respond to, or otherwise remind me of something. I think it's
been a couple of years since it's been entirely empty. (This is not to say
I'm out of things to do -- I have other to do lists and reminder systems
that are quite well stocked, thank you.)
The causes for the emptiness, per se , are relatively straightforward,
if unusual. Rather, what is interesting grist for the reflective mill is
the way in which my use of email has shifted over the last several years.
This shift is the result of multiple factors, ranging from the software
I use, changes in my own work practices, and changes in social practices,
and I think it's worth exploring some different ways of thinking about the
role of email -- and more broadly, communications -- in future computing
systems.
I began with Eudora, appropriately enough, as a consequence of an email
message: a friend wrote suggesting I try it, saying that it would change
my life. As my friend is a well known researcher and writer on the social
effects of computing technologies, and particularly chary of hyped claims
about high tech stuff, I was intrigued by his seemingly hyped
claim. So I tried it.
Eudora did, indeed, change my life.
Of course, at the time I was using the UNIX "mail" program
to read my mail (and I was accessing UNIX through a terminal emulation program),
and so it was not hard to do better. The ability of Eudora to automatically
download email every so often -- whether it be every five minutes or once
a day -- only returned me to a state of grace that had been familiar when
I lived in UNIX in my pre-Apple days. The other new feature that Eudora
had was more novel: Eudora included an easy way to create multiple mailboxes,
and made it straightforward for me to a particular message into a particular
mailbox. So, as I used Eudora, I begin developing a fairly well ordered
archive of email. Taken together, these two features greatly improved the
experience of receiving, reading, managing, and storing email; however,
I can't really say that they changed the way in which I used email. That
came with the next major release of Eudora.
Sometime in the spring of '94 I began using version 2 of Eudora, which featured,
among other enhancements, automatic filters. Automatic filters allowed me
to define rules for automatically filing mail, so that Eudora could put
messages that fit certain characteristics (e.g. to or from a particular
address) into particular mailboxes. At the time, filters just seemed like
a convenience, but as a consequence I gradually began to use email in new
ways. The proximate change was that I began to subscribe to more and more
mailing lists, mailing lists of sufficient volume and insufficient relevance
that I was neither able nor inclined to read them on a daily basis. I could
now create automatic filters that would allow the email from various lists
to slip unseen into various folders, where I could browse or read it at
my leisure.
Now let's jump ahead in time, and look at two ways in which I'm now using
Eudora that are a consequence of this automatic filtering. I subscribe to
a mailing list called Red Rock Eater (RRE). RRE is a moderated, send-only
list. It consists of articles that its moderator, Phil Agre of UC San Diego,
finds of interest, primarily articles about the social impacts of computing,
particularly those that are relevant to his progressive/humanist point of
view. The list is high volume, not so much in number of messages as in the
length of each message. Even though I find about one out of every fifty
or a hundred articles immensely valuable, without Eudora's automatic filtering
and filing I wouldn't subscribe, because I couldn't keep up with the list's
volume.
Another example is my subscription to the FAQ-Maintainers list. Last fall
I became interested in FAQs (Frequently-Asked-Questions lists), because
they represent one of the relatively few examples on the internet of cases
where knowledge is being constructed in a concentrated, well-structured,
accessible form (as opposed to being distributed through long, divergent
conversations). Wanting to understand more about the creation and management
of FAQs, I subscribed to the FAQ-maintainers list so I could get a glimpse
of the various issues that come up as the practices and policies of FAQ
custodians are described and debated. Now a dozen messages a day pour into
that mailbox--and this has the useful side effect of keeping FAQs in the
periphery of my awareness. Occasionally I skim a few to get a sense of the
conversation, but by and large I'm simply letting them accumulate, building
a corpus of information that I can examine at my leisure.
So here are two new ways in which I'm using mailing lists, now that I'm
freed of the chore of managing the message flow on a daily basis. In the
first case, messages are filtered by a person whose point of view I value,
and then I 'mine' the result for things of interest to me. In the second
case, messages from a community of people involved in a common activity
(FAQ creation and maintenance) are automatically being compiled into a research
corpus.
Now, in some ways, these uses of mailing lists doesn't seem terribly different
from getting on the internet and reading newsgroups. However, there are
two key differences. The first has to do with awareness: the messages come
to me, rather than I going to them. This is important because these are
not mission-critical things, but rather topics I'm mildly curious about.
While curiosity might provoke me into going out and browsing once or twice,
it would rarely keep me doing this on a daily basis unless the topic in
question became central to my job. But, with mailing lists, I can turn on
a stream of messages on a particular topic, so that they keep tickling me
with their subject lines if not with their content, until I either grow
more interested, or grow bored and turn the stream off. And while they stream
by in the periphery of my attention, at least some of the messages have
a chance to engage, to resonate with, to play off of, or otherwise interact
with my more central interests. This makes my intellectual environment richer
and more stimulating.
A second difference between my use of Eudora and going out and browsing
the net is that the messages are present on my own disk, on my own PowerBook.
This is important because the times in which I usually browse the collected
messages are "spare moments," when I don't have other pressing
things to do: perhaps on a plane trip; perhaps in the audience for a less-interesting-than-anticipated
talk; perhaps while waiting for a late meeting to finally get started. Significantly,
these spare moments generally occur while I'm away from my normal infrastructure,
including network access; it is this partial isolation that creates the
spare moments: if I were in one of my regular workplaces, there would likely
be more pressing tasks at hand. So, for me at least, having the information
available locally, rather than over the net is crucial.
These ways of using Eudora don't feel at all like "doing email;"
I'm not dealing with personal messages directed specifically to me. To me,
it feels more like the way I use newspapers. Consider the following parallels:
I think this parallel between my use of Eudora and my use of newspapers
is quite interesting because six years ago I participated in the design
of an electronic newspaper... and what I designed then lacks a number of
the features that I now value in Eudora. The nature of the features that
are absent -- and the reasons for their absence -- is telling.
The electronic newspaper was originally named "Hearst" by a high
level manager, but the team, not appreciating all the connotations of that
moniker, renamed the project Rosebud, drawing
from the movie Citizen Kane. The basic idea of Rosebud was that it allowed
its users to keep up with information that was scattered across a network
of distributed, heterogeneous, and ever-changing databases. Rosebud had
three components: Reporters, the Newspaper, and Notebooks. Reporters were
search agents that could be given topics (i.e. queries), and pointed at
one or more databases, and programmed to look for new information every
day (or however often you wished). (Rosebud's Reporters --and only the Reporters
-- eventually evolved into the product AppleSearch.) Each Reporter owned
a column in the Newspaper (figure 2 ), and so when it returned with its
findings it would publish them there. Typically the Reporter would just
publish an excerpt from each thing it had found so that the Newspaper was
more browsable; if the user was interested in something, the Reporter could
fetch the rest of it. Finally, Notebooks were provided as a place to store
and annotate interesting information. (A more complete description of Rosebud
and the studies which informed its design can be found in Erickson and Salomon,
1991). So, the basic use scenario we envisaged was that a user would create
a Reporter for each type of interest he or she had, point it at appropriate
sources, and articles would begin showing up in a new column in the daily
newspaper. The user would reach the news for each day, and save interesting
articles in the Notebook. As the user developed new interests, new reporters
would be created; when a topic became uninteresting, its Reporter would
be decommissioned or re-purposed.
Now let's look at how Eudora, and particularly the features that support
my 'newspaper-ish' use of it, differ from those of Rosebud, which embody
what I envisioned as an electronic newspaper five years ago. I see three
important differences. The first difference is that unlike the newspaper,
Eudora does not have daily (or even separate) editions--it's cumulative:
the new messages all pour into the same (multi-part) container. No management
is required. In contrast, the newspaper model assumed -- implicitly -- that
the newspaper would be read every day; as designed, you'd have to open seventy
two newspapers to browse through the last six weeks of content from a particular
source. It's interesting to note that there was no strong principled or
technical reason for this decision: it was simply inherited from the choice
of metaphor.
A second difference is that Eudora provides a framework within which conversation
can occur. Because it is easy to respond or forward any piece of content,
Eudora is biased towards discussion, whereas Rosebud was designed as a one-way
retrieval and presentation system. Let me give an example of why the "conversational
nature" of Eudora is important. On August 12th I was browsing through
a few of the 200 unread messages in my RRE folder. I came across an interesting
message from early June, and casually forwarded it to my group and one other
person, with whom I'd been discussing similar issues. I had no expectation
that anything concrete would result; I was just sharing an interesting article.
However, the "other" person forwarded the message to his group,
and some of the replied, and, over the next three days more than a dozen
messages were sent, a brainstorming meeting was organized, and so on. The
point is that Eudora made it very easy to shift from acquiring information
to sharing and discussing it with others. In contrast, the Rosebud Newspaper
was designed principally for reading, and for annotation by its user (e.g.
allowing highlighting, clipping of articles, etc.). While we were quite
conscious of the fact that newspaper articles were shared -- indeed, we
observed that some of the users we studied made a regular practice of clipping
newspaper articles, marking them up, and circulating them to colleagues
-- we envisioned such sharing being done via a separate email application
into which the user cut and pasted articles. However, at least in this case,
had there been the extra overhead of launching a separate application, I
might not have gone to the trouble since I had no reason to expect any particular
payoff from sending the message. Why didn't we simply integrate email into
Rosebud? After all this time it's hard to say, but again I find myself wondering
about how much of a role the newspaper metaphor played.
A third important difference between Eudora and Rosebud is that Eudora uses
people as agents rather than having electronic ones. That is, in Eudora,
mailing lists moderated by people are playing the role that I originally
envisioned for Reporters. And that's a good thing. For me, at least, AppleSearch
never worked because the Reporters I defined brought back nothing but junk.
Perhaps the retrieval technology was not sufficient, or perhaps the Reporters
were pointed at sources where there was nothing I wanted, but nevertheless
they always brought back junk. Sure, some mailing lists are full of stuff
I don't care about, but not all. Mailing lists have the advantage of having
human intelligence behind them, and mailing lists that are moderated by
one person, or that have a very specialized topic and a small group of contributors,
are very worthwhile reading... or at least browsing.
What these last two differences point to is the importance of allowing room
for human, social action. Rosebud was conceived as a single user system:
it's electronic agents gathered info, and brought it back to one person
who could mark it up and save it. In contrast, all the content within Eudora
has links back to people, and Eudora makes it trivially easy to 'follow'
those links by replying, to to forge new links by sending and forwarding.
Eudora takes advantage of a lot of things we take for granted: people are
smart; people are engaged by topics that interest them; people gain recognition
and status by finding and sharing information; people like to transmit and
reinforce their points of view; people like to talk things over. Eudora
works significantly better than, I believe, Rosebud newspapers would
have (though the newspapers were never actually implemented), because Eudora
provides a framework which leaves room within it for humans to do what they're
good at.
Erickson, Thomas D. and Salomon, Gitta. "Designing
a Desktop Information System: Observations and Issues." Human Factors
in Computing Systems: CHI '91 Proceedings (ACM: 1991).
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