International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

Since the 1970s, electronic mail (email) has changed from being a rudimentary method of text-based communication between a very few computer users in military research establishments, universities, and commercial telecommunications labs, to become a highly sophisticated and widespread media form. The growth of email has helped underpin not only the rise of the →  Internet as a primary communicative technology of the early twenty-first century, but has also been an important contributor to the ongoing expansion of the “network society” more generally ( Castells 1996 ). Today, email has become a basic means of communication in the everyday life of hundreds of millions of people in the developed and developing economies of the world, linking and expanding their social, cultural, political, and economic realms in ways that continue to be unforeseen and innovative; bringing new issues, problems, and opportunities to the processes of institutions and to individual lives, which are increasingly shaped by digital technologies. Email continues to be a media that primarily uses text-based forms, but it now increasingly incorporates digital video, →  Photography , and sound files (→  Digital Imagery ). Moreover, in the body of the text an email addressee can click on a hyperlink that will automatically direct the user to a website, or email attachments can be opened to reveal files in, for ... log in or subscribe to read full text