The latest email update imposed upon us by Microsoft has some more and less wonderful new features. A little box saying ‘not verified’ appears across the sender’s name if it thinks they are somehow suspect. This includes some, but not all, UM colleagues using their UM accounts. What does Microsoft know about those colleagues? Have they been fired? Are they under investigation for misuse of their email, or something worse?
Confetti or balloons
The most enraging feature is the way it generates colourful confetti or balloons when you receive an email with words like ‘thank you’ and ‘congratulations’. The moving confetti is both startling and infantilising. I’m not five years old, and I’m at work. By chance I discovered how to turn off this annoying feature, but why was it the default setting? Only PC users are inflicted with this, my Mac-using colleagues tell me they don’t have this problem.
Boomer
We can also now respond to email with emojis. Yippee, but I do know how to spell, and responses often require more than a thumbs up or a smiley face. Clearly this marks me as a boomer (tail end – I haven’t yet retired). There are ‘surprised’ and ‘sad’ emojis, but no thumbs down or middle fingers.
Silly
AI-generated suggestions about how to respond are now quite common. Again, these are overly positive and friendly, full of gratitude for yet another email. Where are the options for ‘f**k off’, ‘what is your point?’, ‘maybe you should have waited 24 hours before sending this to all of your colleagues’, and ‘too long, didn’t read’. I could suggest some useful abbreviations if we want to full GenZ, such as WTF, WTF–JK, TLDR, IDC, (SWM)squared. The latter draws on dating site lingo from when I was younger: ‘stop with the mansplaining, single white male’.
There are many worse things about the Faustian pact universities have entered with Big Tech. These include technical and financial lock-in and loss of autonomy and self-respect. But these new Outlook features are just silly.
Sally Wyatt, Professor of Digital Cultures