The bulk of email is ignored and never seen. The cost of sending an email is so low that spamming every email address one can get their hands on is economically viable for the sender. Not all cases are as nefarious as the Nigerian Prince looking for a gullible and naive recipient. It’s simply good business practice for anyone seeking to reach customers as well. A legitimate business will send thousands of emails to drive a handful of sales.
This has rendered email inboxes largely ignorable. the bulk of it goes to spam. The rest is filtered. What remains is quickly skimmed over. Most emails that don’t compel an immediate response will likely be immediately forgotten - or deferred until it is. Unless a sender has earned a place on the recipient’s white list, whether explicitly or implicitly, most emails will never be seen.
Information feeds taken over by AI-generated content will soon meet the same fate. Short and long form content, with and without images, can be generated at very little cost and in very little time. it can be topically relevant, context-relevant while fooling most of us as to its provenance. There is so much of it in our online information feeds, including here on LinkedIn, that it is mostly ignored.
Email is still used everyday. It’s critical both at the individual and enterprise levels. But to the recipient, the first question is always “who is the sender?”
As we browse our LinkedIn feeds, we all ask ourselves a version of that question. Who is behind this content. but not just who posted it - who created it. Did they create it themselves, use a ghost-writing service, chatGPT or some other LLM? Unconsciously (or consciously for some!), we look for any reason to ignore it.
But if the content is good and the creator is genuine, then maybe it’s worth our time. Unfortunately, the cues we seek are hard to find.