Monday, March 01, 2004
The Subject Line (or How A Corporate Procedure Became Part of Everyday Culture)
Hello?
Anyone?
Bueller?
I think the engine has permanently stalled. I'll try to add some gas here on behalf of my fellow bloggers and consider the subject. Line, that is.
One of the more useful/annoying bits of e-mail communication has got to be the subject line. Its roots are from the days when memos were circulated at work on paper. Each memo had to have some sort of one line summary about just what it is you were about to read, just in case the author did a piss poor job of conveying the point in the body of the memo. So when memos became electronic, the subject line had to come with it. Now, with this summary, you can prioritize which "important e-mail" you wanted to read, assuming that you didn't make that choice based on the author of the e-mail.
Problem is, the corporate beasts that created e-mail didn't forsee its impact on everyday life and the post office. Really, who could have? So now, informal letters from person to person are stuck with this subject line curse. How often have you sat there for hours to come up with a subject line for an e-mail? Do you really need to come up with a subject for an e-mail to your kid brother that calls him "boogerhead?" All you want to do is spontaneously fire off a message to your friend, but now you have to come up with one line to prepare that person for what is to come. So you end up with some lame subject line like "Hey." Real catchy.
In many cases, you come up with a subject line and realize that anything you write in the e-mail is now seriously redundant. Let's say you want to ask someone to lunch. So of course you put in a subject line of "Lunch?" or "Let's do lunch!" Well, now what do you do for an encore? You've already put your intentions in the subject line. Why should you add the e-mail?
This leads to another problem. How much do you put into the subject line? After all, you've gone through the trouble of writing the e-mail. You want to make sure they read it. So you start trying to make the subject as vague as possible to make them open the message. Something like "Lun..." Could be a request for lunch, but maybe it's about the lunar lander.
Maybe you can be really clever and make the subject the fragment of the first sentence. Something like "Hey! I was thinking that we could...." Now they have to open the e-mail to see how it ends. Because maybe it will end with "...go out for lunch." But then again, maybe it could end with "...have wild, passionate sex in the restroom of the restaurant that we're going to have lunch at." You just don't know until you open it.
Speaking of which, I must now check my own e-mail. I'm very intrigued by the one with the subject of "Enlarge your penis in 30 seconds." It's likely not a request for lunch.
