Email Is SO Passe

Does anyone else remember the good old days when Jeff Goldblum was doing commercials about how exciting and cool email was? Now it seems that the generation that witnessed email's birth has cast it aside like an old glove into the vast pit of obsolescence. Although campus email is still in full effect* at my university, colleges have started to use alternate services like text messaging and Myspace to transmit information to students and many students are finding the change agreeable. Am I one of these students? Not at all. It seems like the appeal of Myspace, facebook, and text messaging resides primarily in their trendiness and their utter remoteness from authority/elderly figures. Now we're just gonna let teachers waltz right into our fragile social world and muck everything about?! I would find it rather disheartening to receive a text message or a friend invite from someone only to realize it's from my grizzled American Politics teacher. No offense to teachers or anything (heck, I'm an education major), but I feel as though work should be separated from social life, especially schoolwork. I mean teachers are already moving in on the podcast front, which in my mind's eye is similar to Hitler's annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. And I think we all know how that worked out. I suppose there is something useful in having different channels and networks designed to spread information, especially if the information is urgent. But there's a small voice in the back of my mind that's telling me the whole thing might snowball out of control as technology inevitably does and instead of getting a weekly email from a professor we might be constantly bombarded by text and facebook messages as well as emails and the occasional podcast about deadlines, requirements, and school policy. And that, my friends, is enough to make Jeff Goldblum blush.

*as in completely ineffective...