One day several zillion years from now, when aliens from a faraway planet try to make sense of our long-defunct civilization, they're going to be convinced that e-mail came before the telephone. How else to explain our reliance on something so time-consuming, enervating, and maddeningly inefficient when we could all dispense with our most basic tasks -- and coordinate them, for that matter -- with a brief phone call?


Read the whole story at New York Magazine [1]