Of all the main means of electronic communication available to us, including email, cellphone, SMS, WhatsApp, and Messenger, to name just a few, I prefer email to all the others, at least for non-intimate topics, simply because it's asynchronic, thus less intrusive.
When I started using email in 1994, few of my friends and colleages used it. What few people I could communicate then either privately or through mailing lists were mostly computer geeks or early adoptors. Paradoxically, the more people started using email with the popularization of the Internet, the less meaningful communication I've come to have both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Unfortunately, email seems to have passed its heyday as a means of electronic communication. More and more of those I used to communicate with mainly by email seem to have less and less patience to continue to communicate by email. Even if they answer me by email, their answers are much shorter now. And many people don't seem to be ready to continue communicating after sending me a couple of "telegrams". More and more of the questions I send in an attempt to deepen our online communication remain unanswered.
Those I communicate with electronically on a regular basis can be classified into four groups by their native language, which seems to reflect cultural differences in communication: Hebrew, English, Russian, and Japanese. The order of these four languages is also the ascending order of patience for electronic communication by email.
One of the main reasons why I have few chances to communicate electronically in Hebrew is that I prefer email, while many native speakers of Hebrew seem to prefer anything other than email. I must be one of the few people in Israel who still don't use a smartphone, but I still hesitate to buy what I define as an electronic paficier mainly because having a smartphone won't increase chances of my having meaningful electronic communication. I'm afraid I'll end up being inundated instead with the flood of "telegrams" that may mean little or nothing to me.