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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.
In Korea, (current subject) is only used by old people!
Don't Tread on Me
How do they get their v4lub13 P3n!s 3n1arg3men+ notices?
I wonder how the legal community operates? In this country, you'd be disbarred for sending an SMS to a judge or use AIM to communicate with opposing council (for serious matters). As much as email is used, all the documents we use at our firm are typed up and made official.
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.
email is for old people what do they think of those who use the "physical" postal service...
Get your torrents...
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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i'm not surprised, korea is one of the worst spam sewers on the net outside the US, and many mail admins just pre-emptively firewall or ACL korean (or all of apnic) net space. Apparently Korean isp's could care less about all the firewalling, ACL's, and blacklists they end up in and their users are just moving on to IM's.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
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.
Coincidentally, the spam problem in Korea is also worse than just about anywhere else, it's for good reason that much of the world is firewalling the country off. So I wonder how much of the decline in e-mail usage there is due to the spammers.
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!
you know you've left yourself wide open there...
Advanced users are users too!
You know, writing decent email is an art form, something we used to take pride in. But these days, with these kids texting ungrammatical half-phrases all over the place, it's becoming something of a lost art. I tell you, kids today can't write a complete sentence, and they barely even know how to use an emoticon properly. :-\ It won't be long before people forget how to type. Oh, the inhumanity!
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.
Korea is still very much divided into two completely different countrys. South korea is rich, modern, and the most wired country on earth. North Korea is very poor, essentially unchanged in the last 50 years, and the Internet is illegal, along with cell phones. Pyongyang tried an experimental rollout of cell phone service but it was stopped, probbably because the authorities couldn't keep adequate control over it. I've oftened wondered what it would be like if the North actually invaded the South. It would be almost like time travel for the poor Northern soldiers.
Smoking is an expensive, slow, and unreliable method of suicide.
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 |
I realize you can't generalize based on your own anecdotal experience... but does anyone really send one or two-line emails anymore when IM is a hundred percent easier and instantaneous?
There's no doubt that IMing (et al) is huge over here, but a lot of that has to do with the big cell phone culture amongst the youth. They've streamlined it so that it's really easy to send messages to friends and whatnot. But you can also listen to music on cellphones over here as well. Does that mean Korea's going to replace all its stereo equipment with cellphones? You can take pictures with cellphones as well. Does that mean professional studios are going to give up their equipment and start doing portraits with cellphones? Maybe it's comparing apples and oranges, I don't know, but so long as electronic documents need to be looked at, people are going to need workstations or laptops. And so long as these are around, email's going to be a viable way to communicate.
It's not so much that email is on the wane that I'm skeptical about, it's the idea that email is only for old people. For instance, while I don't know from personal experience from having worked in a Korean company, I have a hard time believing that IMing (et al) is going to usurp email for business communications anytime soon.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
We've blocked every IP block from Korea at the router level. The level of spam originating from their IP space is simply astronomical. Maybe if their telcos got their act together, more of their citizens who might want to contact people outside the country might be able to do so. Otherwise, I suspect the reason most people don't use e-mail is because it's completely unreliable due to spammers taking over their networks and being RBL'd.
In America, e-mail is more widely used because it has a longer history. It's been around since the beginning of the Internet, and e-mail was a much better method of communication during the dial-up era. If you're getting charged by the minute (which is what used to happen on dial-up), you want to download your e-mail, read it offline, compose replies (still offline), then connect to send them so that you're not getting charged for nothing. Even after broadband became more popular (and dial-up cheaper), e-mail remained popular because it was well established.
In Korea, Internet access exploded onto the scene with broadband access almost from the start. Imagine a situation where barely anybody uses the Internet, and then one day everybody's on a DSL or cable connection. Also imagine that these users have never been exposed to e-mail. Sure, some of them will use e-mail (especially in the academic circle), but most of the users will be drawn to the communications applications that are more interactive, less boring(?), and require more bandwidth. E-mail just has that much less of an established reputation in such a situation.
Another eason may be cultural. E-mail is time consuming (compared to cell phones or IM), and it is a much more private medium. Koreans are very impatient, and they are also a very community-oriented nation of people. E-mail just doesn't cut it for these types of people, since you never know how long it'll take to get a reply back. Message boards, blogs, IM, and cell phone conversations do, however, satisfy the need for instant communication and community-oriented communication.
Just my $0.02 (or roughly 20 won)