I Sent Hundreds of Thousands of E-mails to the Future. Here's the Story

"The world was different in 2005: flip phones were state of the art, Netflix only sent movies by mail, and kale was a garnish, not a main course. I was working for Forbes's website, Forbes.com. In those days, news websites were treated like awkward teenagers living in a basement apartment, kept at a distance from their respectable parents. The digital media business was fresh and chaotic, and new journalists like me reveled in the weirdness of the Internet and the opportunities it gave us to experiment."

"In contrast, magazine sales teams seemed stuck in the Mad Men era, pitching tired concepts over martinis and treating online news like something you threw into a deal for free, like a branded pen. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today."

"Given this context, you can imagine my lack of enthusiasm when our sales department revealed that they had sold a big advertising sponsorship to an IT infrastructure company and asked me, the telecom reporter, if I could put together a special report on the concept of Communicating. Fortunately, my editor at the time, Michael Noer, was equally nonplussed at the idea of a dozen stories about routers and network switches. So we decided to approach the idea of Communicating from every single angle other than networking hardware. We commissioned Arthur C. Clarke to write a keynote essay about how technology was actually making it harder for people to communicate with each other. I wrote about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and asked experts how they would craft their own messages to an alien species. And I interviewed two dozen lumi"

In 2005, digital media was new, chaotic, and experimental while magazine sales teams relied on traditional advertising approaches. A Forbes.com reporter navigated this environment as news websites were treated as peripheral to established print operations. A major advertising sponsorship to an IT infrastructure company led to a commissioned special report on Communicating. Editorial leadership chose to explore communication broadly beyond networking hardware, commissioning a keynote essay by Arthur C. Clarke on technology hindering communication, covering the search for extraterrestrial intelligence with expert-crafted alien messages, and conducting two dozen interviews.

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