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In Korea, Email Is Only For Old People
_martini_ writes "This short article suggests that, in Korea, email is used only for formal communications, or by older, less tech-saavy generations, while IMs, blogs, and SMS has taken over as the primary means of day to day messages."
I can understand how IM appeals to kids (regardless of nationality), but I find IM incredibly distracting. I guess it's the natural evolution though. As telephones cut into the postal load, so are chat functions overtaking email.
SMS still costs some money, IM isn't as formal, and email is more wide-spread. Doesn't mean anyone has to do what HelloKitty loving teens are doing in a place where technology changes daily.
A blog like any other.
From the article: "Email's efficiency falls in terms of promptness, convenience and credibility," observed Yoo Hyon-ok, president, SK Communications. "With the continuous emergence of new communication means, communication formats will develop further in the future."
How do IMs, blogs or SMS provide any more credibility than E-Mail?
Portland, North Dakota Puppies
In Korea, Email Is Only For Old People
;)
Of course, there is the corollary: IM, blogs, and SMS are kiddy tech.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
I love Korea a lot, but it's got some drawbacks, particularly in its journalism and media. The impetus behind this article might have a lot less to do with the actual oncoming death of email and a lot more to do with maintaining a tech-obsessed culture -- much easier to do if you're constantly promoting new toys, which Korea is.
It'd be like a Hollywood tabloid saying that indipendent film is on the way out.
The ebb of email is confirmed by a diminishing trend in pageviews, a tabulation of frequency in service used by email users. Daum Communication, the top email business in the country, saw its email service pageviews fall over 20 percent from 3.9 billion in October last year to 3 billion in October this year. By contrast, with SK Telecom, the nation's No. 1 communication firm, monthly SMS transmissions skyrocketed over 40 percent in October from 2.7 billion instances last October. Cyworld, a representative mini-homepage firm, witnessed its pageviews multiply over 26-fold from 650 million instances in October last year to 17 billion in October this year.
This paragraph, for instance, is as much about corporate branding as it is about giving email stats.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
It's like that here (in America) too. Most teenagers in America use AIM, IRC, or MSN more than they email. Reasons for this are pretty simple. IMs (and chat rooms) provide instant communication (this is comparable to a phone call, or talking in the halls), whereas an email is like passing a note. The reader has to read and respond seperately.
And as far as blogs, teens like talking about themselves, so this gives them a place to write about themselves as much as they want. Then anyone who knows how to get to it can read it, so its spread to the masses.
And SMS. Many teens have cellphones, and aren't at their computer 24/7, so an easy way to communicate is to a device that they carry with them all the time.
Most of the reasons they give for email being shunned for other mediums are pretty flimsy.
I know people who set up their AIM client so that you can't tell whether they're idle, and only respond to messages 10 hours after you've sent them, and i know people who watch their inboxes like obsessive hawks.
as for email being less "fun" than aim... I don't know, i think my gmail account is pretty cool... and conversational for that matter.
This debate is pretty silly, after all, all we're talking about is persistant electronic messaging. In terms of user experience, email and a client like ICQ aren't -drastically- different. Presumably email will get faster and friendlier, and hell, at some point probably may as well be the same as an IM system.
There are lives at stake here!
My grandparents prefer e-mail. Why? Because they have always enjoyed writing letters. It was the preferred method of correspondance to people who they couldn't otherwise call on the telephone. E-Mail for them is just a "new fangled" way of writing letters.
If shown Instant Messaging they wouldn't use it as nifty as they think it might be, because it's a paradigm they don't neccesarily buy into.
I would imagine this would apply to many older people. Hell, I even enjoy the eloquence of well written letter.
--J
IM clients piss me off, always in your face. They have pop ups, blink in your tool bar, whatever to get your attention. Then to top it off there are 4 major IM's and the good multi-im clients tend to have bugs and not support all the features. There is a good console multi-IM client that works well under screen, but has proxy issues.
Email works, hell, I'd rather have an IM2mail gateway so I can use a mail client. Mail is passive and you control it, IM wants to control your life. (No this isnt a in Russia joke.)
I can also sort mail, pop web mail, attachments, etc. Mail is much more powerful. And newer IM devices include email accounts (POP or Ldap) Even ATT Wireless (Er Cingular now) the Ogo.
We use e-mail for our help desk for example. You send an e-mail to the help address, it creates a new ticket for your issue. This works well, as we get documentation of everything you say to us, and us to you, and it allows us to deal with your problem when a person with the requisite knowledge has time.
IM would be totally unsuited for this. When peopel have your attention in realtime, they want results in realtime. If I answer a chat about a Solaris problem, I'm not the one you want, you want the Solaris admin. With e-mail, this is all taken care of. Someone submits their request, and when the Solaris admin is available, he deals with it.
I certianly don't think IM is useless, but I think young people (I include myself in this category, I'm 24) are a little too caught up with the wow factor. When it comes to bussiness, there are major reasons to want to use e-mail instead.
Each serves their purpose. If I need to speak to someone interactively and immediately, IM is generally a better choice. On the other hand, if I want to send a good bit of information to someone that they're likely going to want to refer back to, or they're not online when I think of something I need to tell them, email is a much better alternative.
I quite like the way gmail is set up, and that is certainly done well to support a "conversational" format. I don't see why this persistent need in the tech community that one tool is always and for everything better than another. It seems pretty frequent though (Windows vs. Linux vs. *BSD vs. Solaris, email vs. IM, blogs vs. newsgroups, I could go on but I'd fill up the server.)
Why doesn't anyone acknowledge that, quite like in reality, software is a tool, and one type of tool is generally better at a given job then another? You don't use a hammer to loosen a nut, nor a wrench to drive a nail, and you wouldn't want to be stuck without either when the need arises.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
I don't like the immediate interaction of IM for the same reason I don't like phones, cell or otherwise. I don't like people virtually popping in and demanding my attention no matter what I am doing. Most of my calls go to VM and when I tried IM I found that I left it set to 'away' most of the time.
If you need to get a hold of me, email is the fastest way. I check them every hour or so. I check the VM only 1-2 times a day. If only I could turn off the phone at work as well.
I'm in my early 20s, and have some major difficulties with IM. Some of my contacts are younger and do prefer IM for almost everything, but I get the sense that they are suffering from continual distractions. Some have admitted to me, jokingly, that they are "addicted to MSN". I think this isn't far from the truth.
An instant conversation is nice to have, but if you have ongoing conversations throughout the day you simply can not focus on your computer work!
People often think they are smarter than they actually are. I am willing to acknowledge that I don't have the mental capacity to seriously work on more than one thing at a time. I prefer the operation of email, since communications get queued up and will be answered at my convenience. Not only are they queued up (Jabber, ICQ does that too of course) but this is the expected mode of operation, so there is no etiquette problem with delays on the order of days before a reply.
Another thing is, most of my friends who are non-techies have given up on email because: spam, and junk from friends. Well, neither of these is really a problem: wonderful, free spam filtering systems exist that will reliably get rid of 99% of your spam, and simple self discipline (and being politely firm with your contacts) will prevent your inbox from becoming the destination for circulated crap.
If I want instant conversations, I pick up the phone or go outside. This is coming from a young guy who is plenty literate with computers! Besides, you can't reliably pick up cues from girls behind a keyboard.
It would be helpful to point out that everyone, everywhere, at ALL TIMES (no, i am not exagerrating) is within arm's reach of their mobile phone: on the subway, walking, in the car, meetings, in the hwajongshil, everywhere, always. The same does not hold true for what Koreans consider "email", where you sit down at your desk, open up Outlook, type a message, and send it off.
The other cultural thirk here is that Koreans, especially in Seoul, are very very demanding of instant answers to the slightest issue. As such, there is no taboo for answering your cell phone in the middle of a meeting (by contrast, this is as bad as farting in a meeting in Japan).
I will say that email is still used for "official" stuff: official sales responses, bids, inquiries, and for formal appointment arranging.
davejenkins.com |
Your post was probably intended to be humorous, but the point is valid.
As we move from traditional letters to email and finally to instant messaging, it appears that we are taking less time and care in the composition of the messages.
A carefully written message is more effective at transmitting an idea than a hastily written message. Proper spelling and grammar results in easier reading and a better impression of the author and the value of the message.
I used to work for someone who would always use cute AOLisms in messages (e.i. "b4", "u", etc). While face-to-face conversations gave most people the impression that he was an intelligent guy, online he appeared to be a lot more ignorant, due to how he wrote.
As I spend more and more time online writing quick messages, I find that my writing skills are slowly degrading. Hopefully, ten years down the road, the quality of my writing won't have suffered too much. But even now, writing this post, I see sentences that could be phrased better, words that should be replaced, etc.
I can't agree more.
.kr domain.
In fact, first thing I do on a new account, I block
I am against blocking entire country domains in fact, I generally report spam through Spamcop (taking my time) and review report while sending.
The problem? They do NOTHING!
http://www.spamcop.net/w3m?action=inprogress
Look at top spam senders, it will explain everything.
Oh btw if there are Korean-Americans out there as moderators, spare your time teaching postmasters of your native country at least how to enable smtp-auth instead of marking parent post troll.
Or, if you can give me my your mail address, I can auto forward 100 spam/week, ONLY coming from hananet etc to your mail address.
In Korea, only old people remember Soviet Russia