John Lanchester, Guardian Weekend, 4 Nov 2006 http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1940641,00.html

‘Email was once a marvel of practicality and utility; people under the age of 25, though, never knew a time before it was broken by spam, and prefer to use instant messaging or texting. In the corporate world, as a publisher once told me, “email’s main function is an instrument of torture”. In civilian life, I increasingly ntice that people don’t actually read their email; they sort of skim it, and get the gist, and any fine distinctions or crucial information are usually best communicated in some other way. So the heroic period of email is already in the past.’