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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.'"
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 !
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
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.
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...)