Email as a New Literacy

A. Adem

ENG 100

Professor Sophia

6 October 2014

Email as a New Literacy

In modern society, many brand new literacies has appear to influence our life, they give us a brand new life style in advance way. Email is one of them has the signature effect to us, it is a new way of communication which is not limited by distance and location. As the result, our communities even the world has became closer and our working efficiency is higher than the past.

I want to first talk about what benefits I have found using emails. I am the kind of person who is very interested in volunteer programs and NGO activities, especially when it has something to do with the environment and animal rights. So, as you can see, emails become my essential tool when reaching out for detail information and help before and during my participation in those activities since many organizations are international and it would cost a lot or take too long if we all make phone calls or simply write letters. Thus, by getting in touch with each other by emails, we can save every penny and that would be extremely helpful for the proceeding of programs and charity and make every move efficient. Along with this, there are other benefits I found using emails. This is a consumption age, and many evolutions are going on in the way people shop, for example, I have membership of many brands, and they will send me brochures in email regularly, this way, I can look through the brochures very fast and find out if there is anything to me as an attraction, if yes, I can go to their websites directly from my email page using the link they attached. Shopping in this way saves me a lot of precious time and energy looking for products I need. And whenever there is a discount or other activities, the email can make sure that I do not miss them. That is from an consumer’s view, if we switch the perspective and look at this in an economist’s way, we would find that email plays a significant role in what we called “ target marketing”, In target marketing, we collect customers’ information and pick out a certain group of customers and mass emailing them advertisements. Because we sort customers according to their shopping interests and habits and then email them in a way which they favor, our products can sell out a lot and become very popular. What’s more, email is also evolving to adjust to people’s multiple needs, we can banned certain contacts from emailing us and thus get a simple environment when we look at our emails. We can also attach attachments in our emails so that when we are talking to a friend or trying to illustrate something to others, we have had pictures, music and even videos in our emails to make our communication more smooth and colorful.

And I have some interesting stories when using emails. When I made the decision two years ago to study abroad, the most urgent thing followed was applying for schools. I went through websites to seek for information that might be helpful to my school choosing. But most importantly, I send out hundreds of emails to schools and some of my relatives and friends in the U.S to find out more about the school. Some reply immediately, some reply days later because of the time difference. I also made some phone calls and did some Skype chatting, but neither was satisfying in terms of the quality provided by the sponsor. Skype requires high-speed internet connection, whenever the internet connection quality drops, your conversation end abruptly which made the chatting annoy and unpleasant. Phone calls are too expensive and I sometimes have to stay up till midnight answering the phone. That period of time was totally a nightmare because I couldn't sleep well. After that, I changed my strategy, emails only. With email becoming my only tool to get in touch with school, I can arrange my applying schedule in a more suitable way, I don't have to stay up or suffer from jet lag anymore. My life feels more in control and I was a lot happier. Staying in touch with friends by email is also a nice thing. Many good friends of mine are separated to all corners of the world today, and we can’t meet so often as we used to be or hang out whenever we want. Given that we all have our hands full of things to fulfill, we cannot just call each other whenever we want which might cause him/her trouble. So, what I have come up with, is that we spare 1 or 2 hours a week for our distant friends. we