Synchronous versus asynchronous communications

We are used to synchronous communications (meetings, phone) with people we know well and care about. We know we can disturb them, and we allow them to interrupt us.

This situation is however not scalable. It doesn't scale in the number of people involved, in the number of tasks (context-switching), in the complexity of the tasks (necessitating many incremental interactions, corrections, etc).

One interesting border case is this of mail, or of short messages. To some extend, these are asynchronous media --one doesn't share the same time, one is free to take or not the messages sent by the other.

But on the face of it, we tend to use them synchronously:

• because we lack a common store of the interactions so far, we tend to use them in a stateless way, either for matters which require no memory --such as signaling: "let's meet then and there"-- or by forcing every message to be self-contained
• we keep waiting for one-to-one answers, and thus share the same sequence of events (a weaker model of synchrony).