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Kids Say Email is Dead
An anonymous reader writes "'E-mail is, like, soooo dead' is the headline at News.com, where a piece looks at youth attitudes towards communication mediums. A group of teenage internet business entrepreneurs confessed that they really only use email to 'talk to adults'. Primarily, these folks are using social networks to communicate. 'More and more, social networks are playing a bigger role on the cell phone. In the last six to nine months, teens in the United States have taken to text messaging in numbers that rival usage in Europe and Asia. According to market research firm JupiterResearch, 80 percent of teens with cell phones regularly use text messaging. Catherine Cook, the 17-year-old founder and president of MyYearbook.com, was the lone teen entrepreneur who said she still uses e-mail regularly to keep up with camp friends or business relationships. Still, that usage pales in comparison to her habit of text messaging. She said she sends a thousand text messages a month.'"
Yes, some people prefer sending messages to talking. Women in their 20s do it a lot... I see them at parties gossiping about other people at the party, it's really annoying.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Over time I think these kids will learn that in the real world where you're trying to get work done, IM is annoying as hell. It's like having someone call you on the phone every few seconds. No thanks.
E-mail, web forums, and other "delayed" forms of communication are so much better for almost everything.
IM is really only a substitute for the phone. And then only when it makes sense, like to save money on long distance or when you need to be quiet.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
I can archive my e-mail discussions, save them to an mbox file and load them into most other mail applications. That's not possible with all that web-based stuff. With some IM programs exporting works, too, but it's hard or impossible to import those discussions elsewhere. Text messages as part of a cellphone - can you archive those? I never tried.
Anyway, I still have my first mail conversations from the mid 90s. Can't say the same thing for other forms of digital conversation.
I have a counter-example. I had a "family" plan with Cingular - oodles of roll-over talk time, free after 7PM etc etc but no allowance for text messages. Before I stopped allowing text messages, my daughter racked up $335 in text messaging in the second month of the plan which was after I told her the text messaging was coming out of her pocket - that's 3,350 text messages that month - over 100 per day - admittedly she paid for incoming as well as outgoing messages. This is the case where talk was free and SMS was expensive.
Go figure...
After that month she toned down on the messages but I still removed that service from the plan altogether after the 5th month or so as it was proving too expensive and I didn't want to spend money on a service that could be easily dealt with using plan old voice !
and less secure... I connect to e-mail through SSL, not to mention that i can easily use enigmail to encrypt it.
Why do I read the "news" here? Seems they try to find all the mildly sensationalist stuff they can, and now the news. The logical fallacy is obvious but, just in case, the conclusion made is that if kids do X more than Y, then X will win and Y will die out. While that conclusion *can* be true, it isn't true on its own grounds. They could grow out of it. With kids, fads are embraced and discarded at a very high rate.
Still, I guess it's fun for moment to imagine a Corporate MySpace system. Even more fun to imagine it as the primary communications method with the email server turned off. I bet somebody would build a client so they could easily send and retrieve their MySpace postings.
Oh, and far as the mail is dying "given the annoyance of spam", gimme a break. Spam will migrate to any sufficiently used open communications medium. Hell, have you seen all the anti-spam tools bloggers have to use these days?
I'm pretty sure this all comes back to the almighty buck.
:)
Remember that it effectively costs nothing to send an email, but I've yet to see an SMS messaging service with a pricing model I like. That isn't to say I don't use SMS, I just don't like it
With telcos buying up ISPs in droves, it's in their interests to keep kids off email and TXTing each other for as long as possible. As a side-effect, don't expect much progress from your ISP on the spam-battling front.
I think I'll stick with email for now.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Society is changing, and it's not so much about privacy as about changing expectations of what should be kept private and what doesn't matter. It's a more open society all around, and privacy simply for the sake of privacy never made sense as a value anyway. It's not even the "nothing to hide" argument--it's "why should I be encouraged to hide anything?" A more open and tolerant society is better for everyone. If you choose to be a privacy nut, have at it, but what would you actually want a society where anything on Facebook of all places should be kept private?
I can understand it. I grew up doing email, now email is my main communication medium, I am in my 40s, and you know what? I am shifting more and more towards IM myself. Why? Consider the following:
We as humans are not geared to multiprocessing and having a hundred open threads of communication. I want to talk or IM with someone, say what we want to say, then move on to other things with our full attention, without this lingering feeling that there is a zillion things we haven't really taken care of and we are leaving open.
If you are wondering, I might get only about 30/40 emails a day, and I may write only 20 or so, but still it's a chore. Young people communicate more, and I can fully understand why they prefer IM, so more similar to speech, so more natural, so more lightweight. I am going the same direction myself, and let me tell you, it feels liberating. I look forward to the day when all the communication with colleagues and friends is over IM, and email is relegated to that twice-a-week habit that is now for me physical mail.
The essential problem with the email/"communication 2.0" dualism is that they are perceived in different environments - email remains a "Ding an sich" while the real communication is being done "somewhere else". So young people ditch one in favor of the other, in spite of the fact that the private messages they send in every communication environment work practically the same as email does. But as long as the "interesting" part is being done on a friendly site with nice looking graphics and for the "dull" communication you have to run a boring mail client (or at least load up some "other" site), there will indeed be a gap in perception.
Once the communication systems mature enough to integrate the full power of today's email features into the services they provide, the gap will close. And yes indeed Google's GMail chat integration is a logical step in this direction.
This is pretty far down for a reply but I've got to post this...
My great grandmother passed down an old photograph book containing postcards she had received (we're talking circa 1900's) to my grandmother who, in turn, passed it to my mother who, in turn, was about to throw it in the garbage when I intercepted it (Being the family geek/tech/now digital archivist)
They were 1 cent postcards containing one or two sentence messages addressed from my grandmother and her sisters to family relations the next state over.
Or so I thought... the messages were your standard high-school girl talk along the lines of "I went out to the after-game dance with so and so last night, looking forward to seeing you this weekend." From the postcards it seemed like they saw each other every week. Not a big deal until you consider that transportation consisted of horse, buggy and train so no family was going to make a weekly journey by train unless they were rich (whoo-hoo!) Until I remembered that my family wasn't (D'oh!)
A little more research and I realized they weren't in different states, they were in neighboring towns (long since absorbed into greater cities), no phones were arount yet so I was looking at the early 20th century equivalent of...
text messaging.
And my great-grandmother, in her nostalgia, had collected all the messages they had received from her sisters and cousins and saved them in this album.
Kind of unfortunate that we won't be able to keep the same for our great grandkids (and thus omg! cnt w8 2cu 2nit @ cncrt! lol! will be lost to the centuries...)
While I agree with you, I can't help but think that it might've been precisely the thing IBM said in the 70s when it saw kids playing with garage built computers.
Maybe we're old farts who are missing something fundamental, and in 30 years, people will laugh how short sighted we all were...
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
The article ends with the problem of lots of separate communities: "It's a problem for teens--you're like losing out on some of your friends if you choose just one. To have all your buddy lists in one place, that's where this is going." So they are working on finally getting to a point where we've been with email for decades.
Also, it's quite sad that sometimes you hear kids talking like "What's your Hotmail address?", as if electronic communication requires a closed web-based system. I imagine it would be a scalability and administration nightmare to have all of email replaced by web communities, and I'm glad we have a relatively light and crossplatform standard, despite the many shortcomings of email.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
seriously, email just isn't fast enough to keep up with what kids want to say, not to mention that the ability to make jokes (however lame they may be) is greatly diminished with email compared to what you can do with IM. but i suspect eventually IM will cease to exists (as far as teens are concerned) perhaps within the next 20~35 years, probably do to cell phones (or some other social communication device that i have yet to even hear of) that are so small and always on/in your ear so that you can be in constant contact with whoever, it will (again) be faster and eventually cost will cease to be an issue for those who are in the upper/middle, trend setting/following classes...
but who knows, if something else comes up... but if you had asked me 10~12 years ago, how often i would be using email as i grew older, for me it was at the time the ultimate form of communication, especially for long distance.
-Yourmomisfasterthanabeowulfcluster
I keep my social networking very private, as it tends to reveal a lot of information. Imagine your boss typing up a memo to send to you on Myspace, only to find some obscene picture(not that I have obscene pictures on my facebook, hehe).
My employer blocks webmail. Justification is they're scared of virii getting through (even though they have web filtering). When this came in I did fight it but not very hard because I knew I'd get nowhere. My main agrument was do you really want people asking for help on web forums and usenet using real mail addresses. (We still can use Google groups so usenet is not such a problem anyway). It's damned inconvenient though.
Every employer is different and it's not your top priority when deciding whether to take a job or when you're deciding if you want to stay at one when a new policy comes in.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I get 30 Spam emails each day into my gmail account
I get about 150 legit emails per day in my gmail spam box. :(
Every couple of days I click "select all" for the spambox, and move everything to my inbox, saying "not spam".
Amber
Wind Beneath Thy Wings
Being one of those non-trendy teenagers who still wears brown despite black is the new black, I came to the IM game quite late: I preferred email for communication with my friends purely for the reason I prefer phone calls to text messages: the intent is clear and the message often more detailed.
The only thing I really use IM for is IRC, and I prefer email for everything else, because there is a possibility that the response may well be legible and not abbreviation filled.
I also like the idea of a constant record of all my communications. Gmail is excellent in this regard.
IM is fine for quick question and idle banter, but for serious matters, email and phone are king.
kill all the fucking niggers
When I was a kid, when ICQ was new, all of us used ICQ or (later) AIM to communicate anyway. None of us used email to strike up conversations and organize stuff, because we needed that spur-of-the-moment realtime interaction that augmented calling the person up on the phone.
IM supplanted the phone because not everyone had cell phones at the time, and calling the person up would interrupt the rest of the family unless they had a private line. More than likely they were tying up the one phone line for the internet anyway.
So, IM gained rapid acceptance.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON