Description
An exploration of how email is experienced, understood, and materially structured as a practice spanning our everyday domestic and work lives.
Despite its many obituaries, email is not dead. As a global mode of business and personal communication, email outstrips newer technologies of online interaction; it is deeply embedded in our everyday lives. And yet--perhaps because the ubiquity of email has obscured its study--this is the first scholarly book devoted to email as a key historical, social, and commercial site of digital communication in our everyday lives. In Email and the Everyday, Esther Milne examines how email is experienced, understood, and materially structured as a practice spanning the domestic and institutional spaces of daily life.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
I Histories and Landscapes
1 The Origins of Email and Its Development 27
2 “Inventing Email” and Doing Media History 49
3 The Email Industry 69
II Affect and Labor
4 Bureaucratic Intensity and Email in the Workplace 97
5 Moderation and Governance in Email Discussion Forums 123
III Archives and Publics
6 The Enron Database and Hillary Clinton’s Emails 151
7 The Art of Email 183
Conclusion 207
Notes 223
Bibliography 269
Index 303
