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I have in my computer every e-mail message I have sent or received since 1992. Minus the obvious spam, this database comes to about half a million messages from people as varied (or similar, if you think about it) as Larry Ellison and Larry Flynt. But lately my e-mail seems to be dying. Yours is, too.

What’s happening to e-mail is complex but comes down to changing contexts and competing media. Back in 1992 communication for me meant e-mail (which at that time for me was cc:mail, MCI Mail, and Internet mail), snail mail, Usenet newsgroups, bulletin board systems like The WELL, telephone, and fax. Today the mix has changed almost completely and I have Internet mail, snail mail, SMS, various chat systems (Skype, iChat, ICQ, etc.), twitter, Facebook and other social networks, and the big one for me — WordPress. BBS’s are gone as are proprietary e-mail systems, my fax machine was thrown-away long ago and Usenet has been subsumed into the Internet as a whole.

Spam killed for most of us the native joy of e-mail. Looking back at my early 1990s mailboxes I see a rich discourse with readers and almost no spam at all. There was no noise to cut through, no need for social networks to vet our contacts. I could get to almost anyone back then by e-mail and they could get to me.

Then spam spoiled it all. I hate spam. I feel betrayed by spam and the spam industry. Remember those proposals to put an ISP postage charge on e-mails to eliminate spam? Those proposals failed because it looked too much like a restriction of speech or a violation of net neutrality, but I wish it had worked. I’d gladly pay a couple bucks per month to be truly spam-free.

But as we are wont to do, instead we added a layer of technology to deal with spam just as we had for viruses and trojans. Anti-spam became a big business just as spam had become before it. I’m paying that couple of bucks but this way it isn’t deterring spam at all, just hiding most of it.

For me a second big e-mail hit came with my switch to WordPress in late 2008. Changing from Moveable Type at PBS to WordPress on my own was a revelation since it eliminated two editorial layers and replaced crappy technology with elegant technology. But the unintended consequence for me was a huge drop in e-mail volume since readers could now comment on my work so easily (and publicly) that they didn’t bother anymore to write to me directly. I miss the mail, frankly. I get it that the new system is better for you, but it isn’t as much fun for me.

Then in the last year something new has happened, which I see as the combined rise of mobile Internet technology and Facebook. While smartphones have made us more e-mail-enabled than ever, I think people are actually sending less total e-mail as a result, substituting SMS texting and mobile use of social networks.

Facebook has brought for non-professional writers in us the same e-mail effect I saw when I jumped to WordPress: every wall or chat posting makes unnecessary at least one e-mail, maybe several.

And don’t forget that our youngest networked generation — teenagers — doesn’t e-mail at all, preferring the immediacy and intimacy of texting to almost anything else.

E-mail will never completely die, but I feel it has lost critical mass and is fading rapidly. That’s why when Facebook announced Titan, its new inter-user communication platform, they had such a hard time explaining what it was. Zuckerberg & Co. want us to see Titan as the universal communicator but they feel they can’t, at the same time, say that other media are dying as a result. They don’t want to be seen as the predators they are.

But predators are an essential part of any healthy ecosystem, remember. So this is all good, I guess.

Sad, but good.

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Just in case you ever sue me, you should know that I have every e-mail I have ever sent or received since 1992. That’s crazy from a legal standpoint, I know, but I can’t help myself. I’m obsessive-compulsive that way. But having a clear view of 16+ years of mail amounting to more than four gigabytes of mainly ascii text gives me a sobering sense of how poorly e-mail does the job lately compared to its glory days of, say, 1999.

More than ninety percent of my mail today by volume is spam. Back in 1999 spam was about 15 percent of my mail. Of course I am in large part to blame for this because I sign up for services and tell them, yes, I would like to receive news and offers by e-mail. I do this because I think it is my job to keep a finger on the pulse of the Internet and if you don’t get spam there isn’t much of a pulse. But it sure gets in the way of staying in touch with friends. And as you can imagine, I have a lot of friends.

As e-mail fails, then, we jump to instant messaging and social networks to take up the slack. Instant-messaging, which remains delightfully spam-free, is also like allowing casual acquaintances easy access to your IV drip: they can drop the worst stuff on you with no notice and no way of avoiding it. At least with e-mail you can decide when to check it or not, but IM is relentlessly in your face.

Well then there are the social networks, right? I tried to avoid these for years. I mean YEARS. People would want me to sign onto one or another so we could “keep our address books synchronized.” Why would I want that? But eventually some of my best friends began to take personally my resistance to being part of their automated lives, so I eventually signed-on to Plaxo, LinkedIn, and FaceBook. I might have a MySpace page, too, I’m not sure, but I certainly don’t visit there.

I barely visit Plaxo, but I am pretty consistently on Facebook and at least once a week get to LinkedIn. But that’s it. As far as I am concerned, if you want me to join Bebo or WhereAreYouNow or some other social networking startup, well forget it. Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Facebook do a perfectly adequate job of defining my culture, thanks. I can’t imagine needing another, especially ones that are so gimmicky. Why the hell, for example, would I want to rate my friends or have them rate me? That’s simply stupid.

There’s my money quote for FriendChat, PeopleRadar, RateMyEverything and a hundred other similar sites: “Rate my friends? That’s stupid” – Bob Cringely.

Keeping up with Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Facebook is bad enough, but I now sense that really ugly things are happening to those platforms making them less and less useful to me. It’s the rise of the social networking application.

You know what I am talking about, those applications that are built by third-party developers to take advantage of the social network ecosystem the companies are so proud to create but we all come to hate over time.

My friend Ira is a Facebook whore. He signs-up for every cause, group, or application sent to him by, well, anybody. Then what’s even worse is he expects me to sign-up too so he can send me whatever crap is the specialty of that subgroup.

I love you, Ira, but I just can’t do as you ask.

This is nothing more than social networking spam, folks, and it is sucking the value out of social networks just like mail spam sucked the value out of e-mail. And to those venture capitalists who see all these applications and rejoice because of the added network volume, which they think translates into higher valuations, understand that this very volume will eventually KILL every one of these companies, making your investment in them worthless.

If you think Facebook is immune to this effect because of its success, you are wrong. It’s very success makes Facebook even more likely to fail as a result. It won’t happen right away but it will happen when we’ll all jump overnight to some other platform whose only advantage over Facebook is that it lacks such sludge.

So if you are in touch with me for any reason please understand that while I will become your friend or contact on these services I will NEVER join a group, NEVER join a cause, NEVER accept an invitation (even if I actually end-up attending the event), NEVER become a fan, and NEVER, NEVER, NEVER install third-party applications.

And you shouldn’t, either.