Ping! The WhatsApps that should have been an email
Why Read This
What Makes This Article Worth Your Time
Summary
What This Article Is About
Economist and journalist Tim Harford mounts a defence of email against the growing dominance of instant-messaging platforms like WhatsApp. He argues that email’s core strengths — being asynchronous, searchable, visually organised, and built on an open standard — make it the superior tool for important, non-urgent communication. Sending an instant message that could have been an email, he contends, is not merely a minor inconvenience but a selfish act that imposes your disorder on another person.
Harford draws on writer Cory Doctorow‘s concept of enshittification — the tendency of platform owners to degrade user experience for profit — to highlight a structural risk of relying on proprietary messaging apps. Because instant-messaging platforms are walled gardens with co-ordination problems that trap users, email’s open, portable architecture represents not just a convenience but a meaningful form of digital freedom and autonomy.
Key Points
Main Takeaways
Interruption Is a Choice
Sending an instant message forces the recipient to stop and respond; email respects their time and schedule.
Email Preserves a Record
Email creates a searchable, fileable archive of communications that instant-messaging platforms cannot reliably replicate.
Customisation and Organisation
Email supports folders, filters, templates, and calendar integration — tools that messaging apps cannot match.
Enshittification Is a Real Risk
Proprietary platforms like WhatsApp can degrade the user experience for profit, and co-ordination barriers make switching difficult.
Email Is an Open Standard
No single company owns email, and users can switch providers without persuading their contacts to follow them.
Instant Messaging Has Its Place
Urgent messages, quick jokes, and photo sharing are legitimate uses; the problem is misusing IM for important, non-urgent content.
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Article Analysis
Breaking Down the Elements
Main Idea
Email Beats Instant Messaging for Serious Communication
Harford’s central thesis is that email — despite its unfashionable reputation — is the superior tool for important, non-urgent communication. Its asynchronous nature, searchable record, organisational flexibility, and open architecture make it more respectful of the recipient’s time and more resistant to corporate exploitation than proprietary platforms like WhatsApp.
Purpose
To Persuade Readers to Reconsider Their Messaging Habits
Harford writes to persuade — he wants readers to recognise how their choice of communication tool imposes costs on others. He frames the issue not as personal preference but as a matter of digital etiquette and structural freedom, using six distinct arguments and colourful analogies to build a cumulative case for email.
Structure
Personal Complaint → Enumerated Arguments → Structural Critique
The piece opens with a personal grievance, then systematically lists six practical advantages of email (First… Second… Third…). It escalates from the personal to the structural, ending with a broader critique of “walled gardens” and the enshittification of corporate platforms — moving from etiquette to political economy.
Tone
Witty, Exasperated & Polemical
Harford writes with the controlled irritation of a columnist who has thought carefully about something that annoys him. The tone is witty — full of vivid analogies like chocolate wrappers and juggling chainsaws — but also genuinely polemical. He is making an argument, not merely venting, and the humour serves to sharpen rather than soften his critique.
Key Terms
Vocabulary from the Article
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Tough Words
Challenging Vocabulary
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A personality disorder characterised by a persistent disregard for social norms and the feelings of others.
“It’s not sociopathy; sometimes it’s useful to provide notes and links for something we need to discuss.”
Relating to a strong, controversial argument made in opposition to a widely held view or established practice.
“The attraction of instant messaging is selfish. Messages are designed to interrupt the person to whom they are sent.”
Intended to be used briefly and then discarded; of little lasting value or importance.
“if a message is either urgent or utterly disposable, then instant messaging is fine.”
The ability of different systems or software to communicate and exchange data with each other without restriction.
“Nothing stops you sending messages from one email provider to another, so when you switch you don’t need to persuade your friends to switch with you.”
The process of finding and accessing stored information, especially from a system or archive.
“But as a retrievable record of communication it’s hard to beat email.”
A figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things using the words “like” or “as” to create a vivid image.
“Did I say that all these instant messages were like asking me to pick up your discarded chocolate wrappers? Let me change the simile.”
Reading Comprehension
Test Your Understanding
5 questions covering different RC question types
1According to Tim Harford, instant messaging is always an inferior form of communication and should never be used in any situation.
2According to Harford, what is the key structural advantage email holds over WhatsApp that makes switching providers easy?
3Which sentence best explains why Harford believes the “co-ordination problem” gives Meta power over its users?
4Assess whether each of the following statements is true or false according to the article.
Harford and his wife sometimes email each other while in the same room.
Harford argues that WhatsApp’s encryption is inferior to that of standard email.
Cory Doctorow is described as an email power user and the author of Enshittification.
Select True or False for all three statements, then click “Check Answers”
5When Harford says he assumes the worst about people who send instant messages that should have been emails, what does he most likely mean?
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Asynchronous communication means both parties do not need to respond at the same time. Email is asynchronous — the sender cannot reasonably expect an immediate reply — while instant messages carry an implicit demand for instant attention. Harford values this because it allows the recipient to respond at a time convenient to them, protecting their focus and workflow from unwanted interruption.
Enshittification — a term coined by writer Cory Doctorow — describes how platform owners gradually degrade user experience in pursuit of profit once they have captured a large user base. Harford applies it to WhatsApp by noting that Meta, its owner, can slowly make the platform worse because users face a co-ordination problem: leaving requires convincing all your contacts to switch platforms simultaneously, which is difficult to organise.
Harford uses analogies — chocolate wrappers, a juggler catching a watermelon, cheeseburgers and heart attacks — to make an abstract argument about digital etiquette feel immediate and personal. As an economics columnist writing for a general audience, he uses concrete images to translate structural ideas (co-ordination problems, platform power) into felt experience, making his case more persuasive and memorable than a purely technical argument would be.
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This article is rated Intermediate. While Harford writes accessibly, the piece uses some technical vocabulary (asynchronous, enshittification, co-ordination problem, open standard) and requires the reader to follow a cumulative six-part argument. It also asks readers to make inferences about tone and rhetorical strategy — skills that go beyond simple comprehension of stated facts.
Tim Harford is a British economist, journalist, and broadcaster known as the “Undercover Economist.” He writes for the Financial Times and is the author of several bestselling books on economics and decision-making. His perspective is significant here because he brings an economist’s lens — focusing on incentives, market power, co-ordination problems, and externalities — to what might otherwise seem like a purely personal preference about communication tools.
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