Telephones are good because you can buy them both on a landline (at a cheep cost) or if you want/need more freedom of movement you can buy a mobile at a larger cost. Another good property of phones is they are very rarely tapped and you have a lot more security from them then with email or post. Landline phones are increasingly cheaper then mobile phones, but you do not have the freedom to be “mobile” as with a mobile. A mobile is quite to run and make called with. Gone are the days of having to go through an operator to get to the person you want to speak with, now in just a matter of rings you can instantly have contact with anyone round the world. But on the other hand not everybody has access to a phone let-a-alone a mobile phone but increasing amounts of people are.
The bad side of telephones are only they cannot send actual objects and the amount of information sent by them is also limited by costs compared to post and email. Although the risk of bank details and similar being taken through telephone conversations are low, the risk physically is a lot higher. There are many people and scientific evidence which points towards mobile phones increasing the risk of cancer.
Email has been a major change in the last decade, with all business’ using email to speed up communication. Email has a large initial cost with having to buy a computer but after the initial cost you can have a flat unchanging charge for Internet access, which is low compared to the ongoing costs of both post and telephones. Emails can send both images and documents as attachments, which can save time form having to send them by post and it just isn’t possible with a phone to do so. At the moment worldwide the amount of people with computers has rocketed over the past 5 years but still there are a lot less people who have access to the Internet then people who can phone or write to each other. Emails travel at the speed of light, but downloading documents from an attachment may take time depending on the size of the document and the speed of your computer.
Although there are many advantages of email, there are disadvantages too. The high initial costs often put of business form buying them in bulk. Although most business have email now many small business especially small foreign business don’t and it can be hard to do business with them then. But the largest disadvantage of email is the insecurity. Last year Spam cost U.S business, $13.2 billion. Many hackers use the increase of people doing e banking to their advantage and without a paper trail it is hard to trace them. Many different groups infiltrate and have been infiltrated by hackers. The mafia and organised crime in Eastern Europe have had many links to “black hackers”. The most famous organisations to be hacked into have been the Pentagon and IBM and if they’re not safe from hackers we certainly aren’t.
In conclusion all the forms of communication I have written about have their different uses we know this because otherwise they wouldn’t be used just like the telegram. For instance we need the postal service to bring us actually objects because we simply cant do it any other way, but for letters it is slow and cumbersome. Telephones are good for communicating with almost anyone almost anywhere, and talking to you r bank manager. But it is not so useful for sending documents because it would take hours to read out and re-type a document over the phone. Also the risks of mobile phones are still unknown. Email has revolutionised the world but as the technology of the world has developed so have the minds of criminals, looking for new ways to make money, the risks of e banking are too high in my opinion still. Also email has not been accessible to as many people as post and phones and has left some business without a fighting chance against their corporate rivals because of their lack of money in the short term, which will hindrance their income in the long term.
