“Clearly texting, SMS and chat are very different than writing a letter or email. In fact, I believe what is going on is that people are realising that you use short messaging, like texting, SMS, chat, Twitter, etc. for quick informal messages, and you use email for more intimate and formal letter writing. In this sense, mail is the preferred medium for “letter writing”, and if anything, texting and chat, are killing ‘letter writing’.”

– V A Shiva Ayyadurai, an early “inventor” of e-mail and current MIT systems scientist, in an interview to the Press Trust of India, June, 2014.