It's So Serious

So I’ve been see­ing Seri­ousity men­tioned here and there on the inter­net, and today, there was a seg­ment about it on NPR focus­ing on its new e-​mail “game.”. The basic premise is that employ­ees in large orga­ni­za­tions get swamped with so many e-​mails that they have trou­ble fig­ur­ing out what’s impor­tant and what isn’t, and this leads to inef­fi­ciency and loss of productivity.

Seriousity’s solu­tion? An e-​mail “cap-​and-​trade” sys­tem. All users are given an allowance of “Serios” every week, and must attach them to any e-​mails they send. If you are send­ing an impor­tant e-​mail, you can attach more Serios to it, and people’s inboxes would be sorted by Serio value.

First, there’s an ambi­gu­ity that I’m not clear on, and that is what hap­pens to Serios after they are sent. One pos­si­bil­ity is that they sim­ply expire on arrival, the other is that recip­i­ents can turn around and attach the Serios they receive to out­go­ing mail, and the Serios would expire after a set amount of time. Both meth­ods have advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages. But more impor­tantly, there are seri­ous design flaws inher­ent in the sys­tem, because impos­ing arti­fi­cial scarcity on an infi­nite good is never sustainable.

How would mail­ing lists work? If I send to a list, does every recip­i­ent get an equal share that sums up to the total Serios I put in, or would my orig­i­nal Serio get mag­i­cally repli­cated? If the for­mer, would there be “cents” of a Serio? If the lat­ter, what if I just set up mail­ing lists for every­one I knew and used it in all occa­sions to save Serios?

Per­haps the biggest issue that stands out is exter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions — no orga­ni­za­tion is an island, so how do e-​mails with the out­side world get sorted? Do out­go­ing e-​mails require Serios? Do incom­ing ones get sent to the bot­tom because they don’t have Serios? The ideal solu­tion to this would be if every­one in the world adopted the Serio sys­tem. But even then, ques­tions arise — would there be some sort of gov­ern­ing body that deter­mines how many Serios every per­son gets? Would I be able to get more Serios by sign­ing up for sev­eral Hot­mail accounts? Or to take it from the other direc­tion… if every­one, or at least every com­pany, could set their own allowances, what’s to stop spam­mers from giv­ing them­selves infi­nitely many Serios and flood­ing your box with one mil­lion Serio ads for Cialis?

The answer in this case isn’t an arbi­trary and arti­fi­cial stamp. If orga­ni­za­tions want their employ­ees to use e-​mail more pro­duc­tively, teach them to use the exist­ing tools their mail clients have for sort­ing and fil­ter­ing, along with a lit­tle com­mon sense about when to send and check mail.

Tags: Archives, Internet, Law, Work