Social NOTworking: The Oatmeal Goes Email

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Long-Time Social Media Professional Who Doesn’t Believe Social Media Is Always The Answer; image by Matthew Inman…

Even the popular kids are going old school.

Despite being one of the Web’s first and most popular cartoonists, Matthew Inman, creator of The Oatmeal, is turning to that 50-year-old technology called “email” to “reduce [his] reliance on social networks.”

He’s not alone. Even though we all have many innovative ways to communicate, from chat apps to Zoom, relatively antique email still rules personal telecommunications in business:

• Everyone has at least one email address and generally checks it daily.
• Unlike social-media platforms and chat apps, email is used in every country and on any device.
• Unlike even more primordial phone calls, emails can reach multiple recipients at once, while being less intrusive.

Now, with social network algorithms becoming increasingly stingy, opaque, and capricious — just like the billionaire megalomaniacs who run them — creators are seeking easier ways to manage fan relationships.

The problem: all of us already get too much email, including newsletters we delete without reading (aka, BACN, the tastier version of SPAM). Nonetheless, I ordered some Oatmeal email to go with my BACN for a perfectly unbalanced breakfast.

That is, if my SPAM filter doesn’t get it first.