Email as a New Literacy

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read and reply their emails, making our friendship firm and not too demanding. In emails, we share photos we take in our travel or just simply our everyday life. We share anecdotes happened around us. We share our silly selfish to amuse each other. Before we even realize, emails have already became one essential thing in our friendship.

Secondly, I want to talk about email sponsors. It is universally acknowledged that for a sponsor, the more popular your product is, the more you will make out of it. It is not just money that I am talking about, but many other opportunities. With more people using it, the more a company who wants to have a place in your interface advertising for their product will have to pay. Besides this, there are many other ways for sponsor to make popularity transform into profit. If the sponsor wants to advocate a new way to pay, it can attach a link with exclusive mean to pay. Likewise, If the sponsor wants to advocate other products, it can create a system or a network that work the best with products that are all sponsored by it. So, to conclude, if one product of the sponsor has got high popularity, it has ways to make profits, to advocate other application or software.

But there are also many problems faced with sponsors of these services. One of the worst, I think, is the information leakage. From personal information, corporate information to government and even national information can be leaked. There are many reasons for this. One is that not many internet users have the awareness of protecting their own personal information. They always fill in their information without care for what the real purpose is. Another reason is that nowadays, it is usual to see internet technology packed together with commercial purpose, hackers use all kinds of means possible to obtain people’s personal information and then whether to sell it or to make illegal use of it. The damage level of information leakage also varies, from your information being used for marketing purposes, to commit crimes using it. What is recent on the news is that the disclosure of hundreds of disgraceful photos of Hollywood actress. And the reason is that there might be bug in the apple system, hackers take advantages of it to get their hands on those photos. Even a system safe as apple can have such terrible information leakage, how can we guarantee that our emails will be safe.

In general, email as a new literacy really has creates a new community for us. In this community, people from all over the world with out geological and language limit to communicate with everyone in the world who has a email account and get reply even immediately. As a Chinese student study in the U.S., email helps me communicate with my family and which is very important. As everyone in my family is mow a member of the email community. We take advantages from the sponsors in using email and they send us commercial to get benefits. Although email has some problem with private information, it still benefits both sponsors and users.