Blogging for food

Alastair Duncan

Does today's report that Obama will be the first US president to use email mean digital is normal now? Mind you, yesterday the FBI announced an investigation into hacks who got hold of Sarah Palin's email.

A whole new world of complication for authoritative and paranoid institutions opens up.

One wonders if Obama's Candide-like attitude to technology will shift the attention from the real reason people take up email, Facebook, Twitter and so on - they want to communicate with each other, freely and without fear, to the miserable place of recrimination and *** covering, the downside of corporate communication management.

I recently receive hundreds of messages from around the world as I left MRM Worldwide, wishing me luck with my new venture and other kindly comments.

Many of them were *not* by email on account of big brother concerns. It's a sad reflection on corporate life that individuals are subsumed to the corporate will without a second thought to the perfectly reasonable human desire to communicate with people they like.

There is of course, email etiquette and certain guides to successful email life that I have promoted. Don't send email when you're a) pissed b) angry c) very angry. Do a) spell correctly b) make the message title relevant and c) consider the recipient may have two hundred unopened in an inbox.

One excuse I've heard from corporate apparatchiks for not doing something they were supposed to was they were too busy dealing with hundreds of emails. Don't confuse activity with progress was my advice back. Let's hope Obama doesn't either.