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A gathering of emails?
A metaphor for our time

GustavoG's 'Overview of relatIonships between groups' (flickr.com/)
I use GMail because it’s good. How good? I just found that out, and I’d like you to find it for yourself.

As I write this, 28 July 2006, Manila time, toward noon, if you are on the other side of the world, I know you are in the dark. Here’s what I have just learned from GMail; I mean, here’s what I just taught myself using GMail. The lesson has been there all along since Google created GMail thousands of emails ago, all mine (all 4,975 of them).

Today I learned to use GMail stars (my coinage) to work on groups of related files. Now, you may not realize how vital that is to me since you don’t know that I have 4,975 emails in my Inbox already, an average of 14 emails a day. My first email was from the GMail Team of course, dated 2 July 2005, marking My Liberation Day from my old, slow, simple-minded big-time emailer which is not Hotmail, not Lycos, not Netscape, not MSN, not AOL, not Geocities. I’m still using it because some people haven’t learned, and it’s still big-time and slow and insensitive.

Deadline for the Judi book Monday, 200 pages desktopped to be camera-ready. I’m the editor and desktopper too. I haven’t started my final working and desktopping on all those authors’ final revisions yet, and today is Thursday – since I have not been paying attention to my emails (not downloading the attachments, not even reading them – I’ve read all those 10 chapters 3 times word-for-word I’ll postpone reading them till the last minute), Now I have to look for all those attachments in those 4,975 emails? No. I click ‘All Mail’ on the left and I’m in the first 100 emails. Do I look inside each of these, and then look inside each of the next 100 emails, then the next 100? No. Something clicks in my mind, a gut feel: Try GMail stars. Maybe there’s something in there, a gatherer of emails. Yes! I learn in just a minute or two. So I begin to look for my Judi files – names I relate to the Judi book – and click to select. Then I scroll up and click ‘More Actions’ and click on ‘Add star.’ I’m on my way! I repeat that for each of the files I see as a Judi file.

Now I have all the Judi emails selected, starred. How to work on them? I click on the left ‘Starred’ and look! I got all 11 of them in one list, one place, to work on without worrying where the next one will be coming from. Actually, the 11 emails are a total of 39 emails, with related GMail entries – GMail calls them ‘conversations’ – embedded in one email file; for instance, the 4^th email file is actually 10 emails in one. A folder, Microsoft would call it, but it’s not a folder – it’s an association of files, with one invisible string attached. I like GMail’s tag: ‘Label.’ I’m glad GMail thought of compiling conversations – they talk to me in the language of their relatedness. Built by association, customized for being worked on as a group. Thank you, GMail!

A gathering of emails is a metaphor for our time. In one word? Relatedness. The files are communicating with each other, and to me. Related: To be or not to be, that is the question. ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. If the files don’t communicate, if they don’t consummate their relatedness, it will continue to be a Shakespearian tragedy, and we continue to be another Hamlet.

28 July 2006