1.1 Activity 5 - Conduct An Online Discussion

Using instant messenger, Charlotte, Sam and myself held a conversation about the purpose of email, how well it meets the purpose and the benefits and draw backs of using email. We disscussed that the purpose of Email was to communicate with others electronically, which is faster then writing and sending a letter to someone. The benefits of email are that you are able to easily and quickly sent a message to someone, however there are other ways in which you are able to do this - for example IM. IM is a lot faster than email and you can have a virtual conversation with the person in seconds whereas with and email, you can send one message and it takes longer for the other to recieve and reply back. However with IM you are not able to communicate with people who are not logged on to their computer or the IM, whereas with email you are able to send a message whether they are online or not. The overall drawback of email is that it is not as fast as other services for example - IM. With email you are able to send files such as Word documents, images, sound files etc.. but you are limited to the amount of attachments you can have and the size of the file. Compared to IM the transfer of attachments - email is a lot faster.