Email not giving up its crown yet.

Email no longer rules, declared a headline in a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal. Email has fallen from its throne as the king of wired communication, the author reasoned, because social media, like Facebook and Twitter, offer communicators a more immediate way to share their thoughts, situations and creative endeavors with others. However, while it’s true that email’s monopoly on communication is no more, that doesn’t mean it has relinquished its crown as the wallah of wired information exchange. In fact, social media, rather than snatching email’s diadem, have actually polished it.

Anyone with a Twitter or Facebook account knows how much “noise” those services generate. The compulsion by many users of those media to gush minutiae can be numbing. When email was the sole source of online communication, complaints abounded about information overload. That has only worsened with the likes of Twitter and Facebook. Email, though, as a mature technology, has developed ways to cope with noise. Filters sort messages as they arrive. Folders segregate items into bins where they can be logically acted on. Tags and categories further slice and dice clutter. Those things add value to email. By comparison, Twitter and Facebook can feel as if the postman drove a dump truck up to your house and jettisoned a year’s worth of mail on your lawn.

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