Email

Advantages

Emailing is a great way to keep in touch with people who may have recently moved away or you have recently got into contact with after a long time apart e.g. an old school friend. Using emails are as simple as typing and sending. Getting used to them doesn’t take long and creating a simple message doesn’t consume much time at all. Emails cost absolutely nothing to send. Messages are automatically stored in a draft folder if the message is not sent. Talking to people through emailing is easy and effective as the messages are sent to the receiver’s inbox almost instantly.

Disadvantages

Computers are very impersonal and this can have a seriously affect the socialising skills people have because instead of talking to a person directly, they are simply typing words into a machine. This causes the conversations that people have to be boring and this can in turn can lead to serious communication issues in their future e.g. interview techniques will suffer when applying for a job. Email Accounts can be hacked as anyone with the correct technical know-how could easily do so and destroy your account. Messages being easily stored are considered to be a good thing. However, there could be some cases in which a person will read a message they are not meant to be. This may cause problems with that person and/or other people. There is also the problem with spamming messages, where a company has bought your details off the mail server as a way of contacting you and providing you with information on their company. However, they may constantly send you messages asking you to buy from their website and in some common cases they will send you the same message over and over again.

Threats

Many people worldwide are ignorant of the threat of Email hacking and store very important personal information in a draft message. This may lead to fraud through the theft of credit/debit card details etc. Also, the conversational disadvantage mentioned above can be considered a threat because, assuming enough children suffer from this problem, this could lead to a communicational breakdown in young people. This is also the on going threat of Trojans. These are messages with a subject title that may pose and interest to you but instead of containing a message, it actually releases a virus into your computer. This is a very common and hard to deal with problem. Young people now have MSN and other applications on their phones, thus removing the possibility of Parental control.