Slashdot Mirror
In The US, Email Is Only For Old People
lxw56 writes "Two years after Slashdot discussed the theory that Korean young people were rejecting email, an article at the Slate site written by Chad Lorenz comes to the same conclusion about the United States. 'Those of us older than 25 can't imagine a life without e-mail. For the Facebook generation, it's hard to imagine a life of only e-mail, much less a life before it. I can still remember the proud moment in 1996 when I sent my first e-mail from the college computer lab. It felt like sending a postcard from the future. I was getting a glimpse of how the Internet would change everything--nothing could be faster and easier than e-mail.'"
When distributed networks become truly transparent and ubiquitous, we are going to see a future where todays Internet will look absolutely archaic.
Not to rain on your parade, but doesn't the future tend to make most things look archaic? Isn't that kind of...the definition of archaic?
http://xkcd.com/386/
My mother still writes letters... she's 63.
Funny story. She does use e-mail as well, and was one day complaining to my (now late) father that she was getting too much 'junk mail'.
His answer: "well just print the bloody stuff out and throw it in the trash!"
I prefer to communicate with friends via a system that has absolutely no assumption or chance of privacy, and where I can see ads that are actually supposed to be there. Thank you, MySpace, Facebook, and others, for convincing kids that all the stupid crap they say should be owned and data-mined by corporations. In the meantime, I think I'll go login to my Gmail account so I can write to Daddy. I know I can trust good old Google. They put funny logos up for holidays!
How are these people signing up for Facebook and Myspace without email addresses? :-)
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