Back in the early days of the internet, I made a couple of decisions about how I would use this new-fangled technology. Over the years I’ve steadfastly stuck by these decisions, despite the choices being contrary to conventions that are commonly accepted today. From time to time I’ve felt obliged to re-consider my choices.
Back in 1990, email seemed a neat and convenient alternative to writing letters. Although transatlantic email correspondence was plagued by the necessity of passage through some mysterious “gateway” or other, it seemed to work at least most of the time. As someone who enjoyed letter writing, I decided that for me an email would simply be an electronic form of what I would put in a letter to the person concerned, commencing with “Dear whoever” and subsequently following the style and form of a letter. At the time, there were no accepted conventions about how emails should look or read, and my approach seemed about as valid as any other. Of course these days my rather formal style has come to raise eyebrows – even my girlfriend recently politely queried me on matter.
When email was in its infancy I can well recall the frisson of excitement I felt when something popped into my inbox – perhaps a weekly event back in 1990. That someone had gone to the trouble of writing to me prompted me to put a decent amount of effort into composing my response. These days, there’s little respite from the constant influx of emails, and just reading the darn things feels like a part-time job. Plus of course for me just to respond to the plethora of emails I receive each week – never mind composing a “letter” where a reply is appropriate – eats up great chunks of my time.
When websites were becoming ubiquitous back in the early nineties, I recall a senior colleague of mine confidently predicting they would be a “ten year wonder”. Who, he questioned, would have the time to maintain all these web pages? Over ten years on and the demise of the web page seems about as likely now as the end of the cellphone, and maintaining websites has become a routine part of many people’s jobs. Like it or not, www is here and going to be a part of lives for the foreseeable future.
With the web in its infancy I looked rather disdainfully at those who appeared to use their websites for what seem to me like shameless self-publicity. I refer here to academics not commercial ventures, as the latter of course would use the web to attract potential buyers and peddle their wares. Somehow it struck me as unseemly that an academic would stoop to using a medium like the web to draw people’s attention to their work. Our community publicized valuable work in journals, books and at conferences and not by bill-poster style advertising on web pages, I thought.
So how do I view these decisions made back in the early nineties as we sit on the brink of 2011? Well I’m happy that my emails look and read rather differently from everyone else’s, so please don’t be put out if I respond to your three lines of twitter-ese with a formal response that was carefully proof-read, contains complete sentences (even paragraphs!) and starts “Dear …”. Twenty years on from the web being a novelty, everyone and everything needs to fight for the attention of those who may be interested. Using a website for promoting research and other achievements does I’d admit appear today less distasteful to me today than it did two decades ago. So I’m going to relent, and one day when I get round to it I’ll stick some self-promotional stuff on my home page located via www.stat.ubc.ca. One day, that is, when I can squeeze in an hour or so amidst my email correspondence …
