email archives

A national email archive has been announced, a kind of quotidian social record:

• wholly unnecessary?
• "Quite often the details of daily life are more revealing than the thoughts of a famous person" - governmentality, the everyday.
• bit-rot - it will be digitised and paperised.
• conversation vs. epistolary/business functions - recognition of these dualities between oral and print forms.
  
• spam as a cultural form.
• co-presented by Windows Live Hotmail (TM) - channel-providers as philanthropists.