Noise and clarity. New fashion for old email

“Newsletter is returning. And you will like it, ” LE weekly announced recently Nouvel Observateur . An article with such a heading reported: French journalists again discovered email for themselves, and media are now breeding on the expanses of the French -speaking Internet, distributed exclusively by e -mail.

The trend was even earlier in America. In June last year, the deceased David Carr from New York Times announced rumors about the death of e -mail greatly exaggerated. However, the well -known mediacritic with his observation was also somewhat late.

The revival of mailings is associated with the closure in July 2013 RSS GOGLE GARGETER Reader , which allowed readers to follow the publications of their favorite authors and publications. Having lost such a resource, the American media began to launch their own Newcletters. The newsletter appeared at the Quartz business site, Newsweek magazine, Financial newspapers Times .

Some journalists who mastered the Newcletters did not lag behind, as blogs once mastered. The help of them in this is a free and convenient Tinyletter mass mailing service. According to the summer last year, it was used by more than 100 thousand people, and their subscribers numerically exceeded the population of New York.

The most important news is now learning from the “evening jellyfish”, and the briefing project “Arzamas” subscription appeared before the launch of the site itself.

Not all Russian Internet users will share the surprise of Western commentators. Many of them discovered e -mail simultaneously with social networks, and therefore did not manage to bury it yet. Internet culture here is relatively young, and email It is simply not perceived as an artifact from the last millennium. Nevertheless, in the Russian -speaking segment of the network, the Polar is already spreading. The most important news is now learning from the “evening jellyfish”, and the briefing project “Arzamas” subscription appeared before the launch of the site itself.

The hobby of journalists by New Schools is easy to explain. The site about information technology TechCrunch cites several arguments in favor of news letters. Mail will not fall out of the tape by the will of unknown algorithms of the social network, but will wait for reading-well, in extreme cases, in the spam-basin. Sending is a more reliable way to reach the audience than social networks, where the news is often lost due to continuous update. Readers pay more attention to letters than reports on Twitter or Facebook. In addition, mail can be read on any mobile device without installing applications. And the Newsletter’s Newsletter will definitely not stick the guardians of morality, who unleashed moral terror on the same Facebook.

However, all this does not explain such a mass demand of users for a new old type of communication.

Obviously, the success of Newcletters is due to the fact that they form a more personal connection of the reader with the author or publication. Updates in social networks are addressed to everyone - and ultimately anyone. Mail is another matter. The already mentioned David Carr noted: “My personal digital hierarchy, which I find quite ordinary, is as follows: first - e -mail, because it is for me and about me, then social media is coming, because they are for me, about me, my friends and colleagues; And finally - the anarchy of the network, which is about everything. " Indeed, the letter creates the illusion, as if they are communicating with you personally.

But the point is not only in the "intimate" relations of readers with journalists. The popularity of Newsletter shuts down tectonic shifts in a modern medialandshaft. The revival of the postal mailing is a story about the changed media consumption.

Readers pay more attention to letters than reports on Twitter or Facebook. In addition, mail can be read on any mobile device without installing applications.

Social networks have accustomed us to the information flow, where the most important thing is the freshest. It has long been noticed: modern culture is distinguished by hypertrophied attention to what is happening here and now. The social networks, on the other hand, it seems, aggravated this “here and now” - before the noise in which events are barely differentiated in importance. Like chaos of the most uniform life.

And in 2013, as he writes in The Atlantic Alexis Madrigal (by the way, one of the first to launch a personal Newsletter), this information flow began to bother. Users, tired of its randomness and endlessness, reached for structured information.

The philosopher Norbert Bolz once remarked: “The wider the information flow spills wider, the more urgent becomes the need for a new form of services that can be called the Service of meaning.” Newsletter is such a "daily noev ark in the worldwide flood of meanings." If it was a simple selection of news or analysis of current events, a news letter structures an informational noise, isolate order from chaos.

According to Bolz, the culture helps us to cope with information overloads, forming protective "semantic techniques". So the limited narration of the novel becomes a kind of harbor, fenced off from the boundless stream of information. This also includes series, especially educational series - online courses. They reflect the request of society for great narratives and systematized knowledge. We add to them the defeated death of the longrids and find: media, which so often build guilty for fragmentation of the picture of the world, themselves develop an antidote.

Information overload pushes users to reboot. Someone is hit in media-astismatism , someone contemplates the monotonous Scandinavian landscapes on the screen for hours. Oddly enough, the demand for TV shows, the popularity of the conditional “Courisers” and the revival of Newcletters are the phenomena of the same order as the digital detox and slow TV. These are symptoms of fatigue. Having bought plenty in the information stream, a person rowing ashore. He wants to receive his portion of ordered entertainment, news or knowledge at the appointed hour, in a limited version, and not in non-stop mode.

However, the overproduction of series and courses, coupled with a chronic lack of time, already contribute to the further fragmentation of the picture of the world. Here, as with any antidote, it is important not to perseverate. Otherwise, the same Newsletters will turn e -mail into a newsletter teeming with news.