Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
This only says what youth does, not what they'll use as adults. I'm guessing for more durable and more effective communications the youth of today will opt for something more substantial than "c u 2nit".
Youth today do what they do because it's there, not because it's going to replace traditional communications.
When "we" were young, we passed notes on pieces of paper. The girls passed messages by lip-reading (never understood how they were so good at that). I never saw any articles predicting "note passing", and lip-reading becoming the protocol de jour. If we'd had text messaging, we'd have done it too.
Consider from the article:
That seems to contradict the main thesis of the article. Basically, for important things like business and/or sponsors Martina uses e-mail? The e-mail is not dead, or as the article claims like, soooo dead.Text messaging, social web sites serve a purpose, not replace one. (This is akin the predictions recently "laptops to replace desktops".)
Critical thought, thorough discussion, deep understanding -- none are much served by the text messaging medium. (e-mail doesn't do much for them either.)
They "only use e-mail to 'talk to adults'". They'll use e-mail and more traditional forms of communication when they become adults. It doesn't mean they'll stop using the text messaging and other forms, it just means they'll need the more traditional forms.
i cld b wrng. i hope im not.
When all these kids get in the real world and have more important things to do than pay constant/immediate attention to the cell phone's IM's it won't be so "cool" and useful. An intelligent communication can be handled a lot better through an E-mail (or phone call or in person) than IM'ing.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I don't know about you guys but when ten years ago when I was fourteen, e-mail was dead too. Initially, I used to use Web based IM clients to talk to my friends quickly followed by ICQ and and even later MSN.
I only started using e-mail when my group of friends started working full time. I think the reason for this is that e-mail is mostly open at work because it's required for the business. Moreover, employers don't really care if you e-mail your friends from your account, provided you're not taking the piss. In contrast, browsing social networking sites from work can get you sacked.
In short, there's nothing new here. I think the youngsters of today will follow the same path as I did ten years ago; they will adopt e-mail when their circle of friends grow-up and go to work.
Simon
So people are using _different clients_ to send their ascii messages.
whatever...
Teenage Social Agenda != Professional Business Applications
/* No Comment */
...is soon I'll be using myspace to update my boss on my TPS reports?
This page was generated by a Barrel of Circus Midgets, and that is the way I like it!!!
radio (not dead)
television (not dead)
the newspaper (not dead)
the cinema house (very not dead)
etc.
no form of mass communication ever dies, it just moves out of the limelight. and then it's called "dead" by people wishing to make a melodrama out of the evolution of media
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
... I see this all the time. My take on it: younger people are in a hurry for response. They want immediate replies. But adults (as will these teens eventually) live in a different world, where the speed of response is part of the value but the message itself is important, too. I have to train my students to understand that leaving an email message for me will always result in a response, even if it is a little later, while IM may not.
From another perspective, MySpace and Facebook have messaging features which are simply email in a different form (posting to the web site). I am still at a loss to understand why posting a message on a web site (with the exception of group communication) is more beneficial than sending an email.
Yeah, that's sure to cut you a better than fair sampling of the "youth culture."
And in a related story, a survey of classically-trained teenaged cellists has determined that young people are listening to less hip-hop and have begun to prefer champagne to beer.
Now, how do I text-message "GET OFF OF MY LAWN" ? Anybody...?
... Long live email.
P.S. I wish face-to-face speech would die. I hate my coworkers.
So he'll have a terrible article to repost tomorrow.
The Farewell Tour II
Think in full sentences?
Well, there's your problem, right there.
This is a cognitive issue. Kids can't/won't string together solid thoughts, aren't entertained by people that do, and aren't rewarded for trying to do so themselves. Of course they can't imagine doing boring, old-people stuff like learning to use tools that are built around a more verbose (and demanding, and useful) form of communication. GOML!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Primarily, it's because they want to talk when they're at work, in school, or on the go, but the vast majority of them can't afford a Blackberry.
I can't give you an educated response because I'm texting my BFF Jill.
Sure baby, I'll give you my phone number...in Hex
No way. MMS is very similar to email, but SMS is SS7-based, which is as weird a protocol as only the telco types could come up with.
"I was writing an email on the PC, and it was, like, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep-- and then, like, half of my email was gone. And I was, like- It devoured my email. It was a really good email. And then I had to do it again and I had to do it fast so it wasn't as good. It's kind of a bummer."
... until they have to send their first resumé and cover letter :)
:)
On a more serious note, I have just been sucked into the wonderful/scary world of Facebook, and I must say, wow. I knew people liked to reinvent the wheel all the time, but what's with this new thing of "writing" on each other's "wall" instead of just sending emails? What was wrong with emails in the first place? I mean, I can see the attraction of writing fun things on these "walls", but many go much beyond that and use it to organize meetings, leave their phone numbers, addresses, and whereabouts for the next 3 weeks, for the recipient, but also everyone else to see.
So either this generation does not realize what it's doing (basically posting their contact details while broadcasting their private lives on teh internets), or it doesn't care at all about that thing called privacy.
I haven't even reached 30, and I already feel like I'm getting old
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
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.
Once the grow up they will realize that not everything needs to be instantaneous short bursts of emoticons, and you really do want to send people actual coherent thoughts ( ie, "letters" ) at times.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Well actually they're talking about you.
You're thinking small. Why miniaturize the laser, when we could instead enlarge the sharks? -John Searle
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 !
Teenagers shallow and faddish. Details at 11.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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.
Earlier this year, I discussed this matter with a 16-year-old girl. She said she preferred IM (MSN) over SMTP, because any email account she used would quickly get overloaded with spam. Many of us have different ways of dealing with that problem, but her solution was simply to never use the same email account for too long if she had to use it, and preferably not to use it at all. I suspect that this is not the only reason why she and her friends don't like to use email, but by itself spam seems like a valid complaint.
Kids can't/won't string together solid thoughts
It's true!
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...)
Building on your great joke:
plz use cvr sheet 4 tps, also need u @ ofc sat TBG
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
Heck, I still use the paper post system all the time, because electronic mail is useless for physical delivery of packages. Of course.
Text messaging is for people who want real-time, but for whom clarity and deliberate content are not important. I must be old, because I find communications done in IM seem to have a rather light-weight ADD quality about them. --Which is probably appropriate for kids these days. --Keeping in mind, that the kids using computer communications are regular kids who are worried about clothes and popularity contests and who's dating who, etc. Light fluffy stuff. Email was developed by geeks for geeks, and because of its usefulness, was adopted by business, and I expect will remain in use that way for some time to come. (Try keeping 50 clients sorted in real-time!) Maybe when the ADD kids raised and trained in information sorting of that magnitude reach the business world, they will create a different type of work place and style of business management, but I don't see how they'll manage without something as stable as email. Attention to detail, record keeping and being able to take an hour or a few days to think about all the ramifications of a question before responding become important when you enter the business world.
(Although, given some of the communications I've done a back and forth on with various businesses might sometimes suggest otherwise.)
I see IM and today's social networks as having potential for something very useful in the future, but right now they still seem to be in a rather proto-gimik-time-wasting stage of development. When the business world finally adopts them, it will mean that their value has been proven, at which point the next New Hip Thing will be popular with the kids, and only old farts will spend time on Facebook. If we survive long enough as a culture, that is. . .
-FL
Different technologies have different uses. IM, text messaging, e-mail, etc have not killed phone calls. Why? Phone calls allow for you to hear someone's voice, which is useful and/or nice in a number of different situations. Likewise IM will not kill e-mail. IM is nice, and I have an IM client running pretty much all the time but it's more for contacting friends with quick tech questions, or BSing while I was for a slow lab install to finish. It would work for support, because IM expects a realtime response which I can't always give. E-mail works much better hence why we use it. Likewise, my parents, friends, etc often will e-mail me when I'm at work because they have something to say or want information, but realise that I may be busy and not able to immediately respond.
As for communicating on social network sites, this is just people playing around. E-mail has the same function, but is universally compatible. We are not going to go around telling everyone at work they have to sign up for myspace. Sure it may be fun to use when you are talking to friends who also have accounts, but it does not replace the universal access of e-mail.
You have to remember that they aren't talking about any new technology here. IM/text messaging have been around for a long time, and social network sites are doing nothing other than sending e-mails in a closed system.
For a technology to kill off another technology it more or less has to either be a better version or really change the way we live to the point we don't need the old technology. None of this is a better e-mail, hence e-mail is fine.
especially when there's no additional benefits.
What you're missing is that social network messaging solves THE problem that email has. You know who sent you the message. And barrier to spam is higher than with email.
Lots of other email-like functionality is missing, but the authentication issue (sender and receiver have authenticated themselves to a third party) has been fixed.
paintball