I agree with your analysis. The more common place a certain communication method becomes, it gets abused and start to lose relevance.

I do recommend the Seven Habits book. I haven’t read as many books as I’d like to, but from what I can tell it remains the pillar of modern personal development theories. Its core concepts have become a foundation of all my thinking and analyzing of human nature. It really explains the very bottom of what defines personal effectiveness and productivity.

ari

I haven’t read The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People - yet! Is this something you’d recommend Ari?

When I was a kid, getting a letter in the post was always exciting. Why? Because it was always something good. Either a card (which might contain that lovely stuff called money) or some comforting words from friends or family.

As you get older, most of the letters you start to receive are bills. Letters become less exciting, although still important - you need to open them.

As you get older still, most of the letters you start to receive are junk mail. Letters are mostly irritating. You don’t even open probably half of them.

Email went the same way. When I first got on the Internet back in about 1993, getting an email was exciting because it was always from somebody you knew and/or liked.

After a year or two, most of the emails you started to get were still from friends and colleagues, but the odd bit of uninvited or junk email had crept in. You still liked getting email.

By the late 90s, most of the email you received was junk mail - probably 70 per cent. The rest was to do with work, with the odd one from your friends. Email was less interesting.

By about the year 2005, nearly all the email you receive is junk. Modern spam filters (especially on the excellent Gmail) take care of most of it but when you realise that probably 90 per cent of what you receive is spam it can be quite disheartening.

Email is, for me at least, no longer much fun.

My prediction? Give it five years and the next interface to suffer from this problem will be mobile phones and SMS messages. It’s already happening for an unlucky few, but I can see it being commonplace within that timeframe for most of your text messages to be spam and/or ‘Google’-a-like catered advertisements.

I think Twitter risks going the same way too, alas, as I feel that this kind of thing - from exciting and fun, to routine, to annoying - is a natural progression for all communication mediums. At least, that’s how it’s been in the past, and that’s typically an accurate predictor of the future!