The Flaws of Email

The assignment studying the six degrees of separation theory is revealing more than just a test of how many steps it will take the email to arrive in the right hands. It has been about a week since I sent out ten emails. Five of my ten recipients have sent it on to another person. Of those five recipients, two have sent them on to another person. This means five of my ten letters are still on step 1, three of my ten are on step two, and two of my ten are on step three.

It takes, at most, thirty seconds to think of one person and forward an email to them. With such minimal effort required, why am I getting such a low turnout on these emails? One reason could be that in this day in age, peoples’ email inboxes get overwhelmingly cluttered with junk. In fact, I spent a good amount of time trying to think of the best thing to put in the subject line, so that it would have the best chance of getting forwarded on. I finally decided on “Northeastern University Six Degrees of Separation.” I was going to say “Six Degrees of Separation Study,” but I thought that some people might look at the subject line and immediately think it is some sort of spam. I was going to say “Please forward this on,” but that too could easily be marked as spam when skimming your inbox. A realization that I made after the fact, is that the five people who have not forwarded on my email are people whom I emailed for the first time ever. With Facebook messaging and texting, I never find it necessary to write emails to friends. I can imagine that these people may not know who dtbar1@gmail.com (my email) is, and saw the words “Northeastern University” in the subject line, and considered it some sort of advertisement or spam without reading the contents.

This problem can occur all of the time with this mode of communication. For example, I get emails from the Honors program all of the time about certain events, fundraisers, and community opportunities. I have been deleting and disregarding these emails for years now. A few weeks ago, I received an email from them saying that I needed to have a senior clearance meeting in order to make sure I was all set to graduate with honors. The problem is that the subject line started with the same “NU Honors Program,” and I deleted it. Luckily, I was able to find out through a friend about this requirement, but it is still an interesting example of how email might make it difficult to get a message along.