Response to Kevin’s post “What do you see as positive outcomes of e-mail and instant messaging? ”

I do not totally agree with the negative aspects that mentioned by Kevin. He points out that there is no definite way to know whether recipients received an e-mail or not. However, by looking at some popular software such as Outlook, Outlook Express, and Thunderbird, we can get into detailed setting to check the option of requesting read receipts. Once your friend received your e-mail, your friends will be requested to send an acknowledgement back to sender.

As to instant messaging (IM), I agree that the pop-ups window is a little bit annoyed while I am working. Nevertheless, my belief is that it is not a negative aspect in that you can go the “Tool” function and choose “Alerts and Sounds” option. Then looking at detailed options, you can check or uncheck display alerts in many occasions.

Still, E-mail does have some negative aspects. The most notorious one is the junk e-mail. If you have two or more e-mail accounts, you may have a need to cope with ample of junk e-mails by daily basis. Or you are likely to be inundated with junk e-mails. Imagine three or four hundred e-mails you receive every day, how many of them are useful or worth to look into the content? Not to mention that a lot of viruses or malicious software such as Trojan perfectly hided behind your e-mails. Indeed, you may say by using firewall or virus protection software you can detect these malicious virus or software. However, the fact shows that most people still not trust such types of software primarily because their computers are still likely to infect viruses due to various reasons.

IM does enhance our communication even better. However, nowadays an increasing number of children surf the Internet talking with their friends all the day. Their parents may be too busy to keep an eye on their children. IM can pull people even closer, but it could quietly steal people’s time without noticed by users. Simply put, technology itself can enhance our working or communication with no doubt as long as people are aware of what they are doing and have a sense of time elapsing.