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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.'"
Back in 1982 my folks walked into my room to watch a conversation with a friend of mine overseas as we typed into our Apple ][s back and forth on term. The glowing green letters popped up on a 200 baud connection or something like that a few characters at a time and you could absolutely talk faster which led my Dad to scoff and say "why don't you just pick up the phone?". I told him that is was not just words, but programs that we were sending back and forth and he just did not understand the implications to which his reply was "what does a 12 year old know?".
The funny thing was that at the time that *was* instant messaging, so while email has been around for quite a few years, we now have beautifully designed mobile phones, IM clients of many flavors, tweets and all manner of both temporally immediate and time shifted communiques. It's been an amazing road to watch, but more impressive is that we are still only on the cusp of a much larger communication revolution that's been building for the last 20 years. When distributed networks become truly transparent and ubiquitous, we are going to see a future where todays Internet will look absolutely archaic.
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who the hell did they interview? college students couldn't live without email.
Email has been ruined by spam. Either you don't give out your address, meaning that you cannot make wide use of it, or you get too much spam.
Table-ized A.I.
Is it me, or are people who only use Social Networks for messaging people are merely using a more limited form of "email" (loosely speaking-- as a internally controlled messaging system).
IM is fine. IM is great. But IM only works when both are connected and both have time to reply. I prefer IM for short pings to people, quick exchanges or realtime issues. But email is much better for longer, more considered discussions, especially when the issues may take hours or days to figure out.
I would not use email to check if someone wants to catch lunch. And I would not use any kind of IM to discuss issues with the latest revision of a journal paper. As a guess, when you're 16 you have a lot of the former kinds of communication and very little of the latter. As you grow older the balance shifts. Both have their place.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
IMing "OMG - did u c Larry - teh gay!" will only get you fired.
IM is useful in some contexts with some teams, but by and large, it's counterproductive.
And FACEBOOK at work? BWAHAHAHAAAA!!!
YOU ARE SO FIRED!!!!
You're in a meeting and some clown texts you with "OMG - did u c Larry - teh gay!" and you answer? YOU'RE FIRED.
Email is crucial in a business environment as it is not synchronistic - you don't have to engage, and there is no immediacy. That is important.
Jobs make all the difference - sitting around doing bong hits in your dorm is OK for facebook. But getting paid to do something is something else altogether.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
In the 1970's, I used a the CDC PLATO system, which looked more like the modern internet than the internet in the 1970's looked like the modern internet. It had instant messaging (term-talk), email (pnotes), forums (notes, later to evolve into lotus notes), and chatrooms (0chat). No one talked about one replacing the other because they were all good for different things.
In the early 1980's, I used IBM's CMS system. It had instant messaging (#cp msg) and email, but sadly, no forums nor chat rooms. People talked about needing the later two.
In the mid 1980s to the early 1990's, I used unix. It had IM, email, forums and chat rooms.
Since the early 1990s', I've used unix on the internet. It has IM, email, forums and chat rooms.
Now, in the 2000's, people claim that IM will kill email? Huh? I don't see it. Did these people never have IM before?
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
At least as much as overnight delivery did.
Overnight had a huge impact on the industry. Until overnight was an issue, we were used to having a few days of waiting time between ordering and receiving. With overnight, JIT manufacturing turned from something that required often a lot of logistics and planning to a fairly trivial task.
The advent of email had the same impact for offices. It suddenly became trivial to send documents instantly. Not only as a printed copy with fax machines, which were impossible to edit and to process further sensibly, but now you had a working and workable copy at your hands. Instantly.
So it's quite logic that the 30+ generation, i.e. office people, often in elevated positions, view email as a vital part of their life. It became trivial to send a copy to your boss, send a copy home or work from home and send the result to your office.
Yes, that's not what mail is for. I personally get ruffled the wrong way when I see people generate insane overhead by latching binaries to mails instead of using sensible ways of transfer (like uploading to some server and sending the FTP link via mail), but that's how mail is being used.
So I guess the reason why mail is so popular with "the old" (read: people aged 30+) is less that it's a communication tool for sending messages. It's being used as a tool to transfer data of various kinds. From wordprocessor documents to spreadsheets to binaries. I think people value the fact that they can link attachments to their mails higher than the fact that they can exchange simple text.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So the kids us IM now. That means that email is DEAD!
Yeah, whatever. Look at what the kids are sending. Short, light messages. Anything more and they talk in person or talk on the phone. OMG! Just like the adults do!
And the funniest thing is that this article is from a guy who just discovered email in 1996.
IM is great for "lunch?" or "meet 4 pizza".
It's not very useful when you have to discuss Johnny's grades and why he is not turning in any assignments.
One thing that I realized recently while talking to some younger kids, is that most of them have never used a real email client, just webmail. So while we geeks think of email as a standardized flexible protocol that can be used for all sorts of things given the right software, they just think of it as a website where you can leave messages for people.
Facebook is the same thing but with several simple but important improvements. The friends list acts as a mailing list of sorts, something that very few of the kids I have talked to know how to do with webmail. It also acts as a grey-list spam filter, limiting unsolicited messages to your request box where they are more easily ignored. There are features that act as the analog to outlooks meeting request, which is quite useful but you don't ever see used outside of work, I guess because of the implied formality of it.
I guess what it comes down to is that features are useless unless they are accessable, so your level of expertice will dictate whether email or social networks are the more limited of the two.
I agree. Like with so many things, convenience makes people blind to the dangers. Complacency breeds carelessness. Unfortunately the people responsible for protecting the sheeple (i.e. politicians, yes, it's true!) are actually working against them and instead of promoting privacy (e.g. private encryption methods) they openly oppose them in the name of national security.
I have recently been finding myself thinking almost the opposite. When I saw that for $150 I could buy a new motherboard and memory that would well over double the speed of my computer, double my memory, and bring my 3 generation old video card that runs everything I play just fine up to being just one generation behind the curve, all while cutting my electrical usage in half, I started looking at the machines around my house. I was amazed at how fast the new system was, but what amazed me more was that the Alienware PC I bought in 2000 (handed down to my son a few years ago) still runs everything I use adequately. Obviously if I am re-encoding a DVD, I would rather do it in literally 10th the time, and this machine is not a full decade old, but it is fully usable with current versions of software. I suspect that this has as much to do with the fact that new machines are not really fast enough to do anything truly revolutionary over the what we had in 2000, but it still amazes me that a 7 year old machine can be considered anything but a retro system.
This is why I have started to look more at power consumption than speed lately. I would plunk down money faster for an AthlonX2 2600+ that was fanless and used 20 watts than I would for an AthlonX2 5600+ that requires a fan and uses 50 watts.
there fixed that for you.
You've got an easy breezy wind at your back...most of the time.
I've seen it too when I try to communicate with younger people (i'm in my mid 20's). I use facebook to write messages that I know will hang around for awhile, like "Happy Birthday!" or "congratulations on ________!" When facebook started, that's all you saw.
Now I see stuff like "hey pizza l8r?" or "wanna meet for that group project?" I wanna crack my head on a wall. No one over a certain age lives on facebook, and no one under that age realizes this. Note to the younger generation: if its time sensitive, your *absolute last* place to leave the message is a social networking site.
That setup solves the problem of you having to wade through tons if spam manually, but it creates the problem of legitimate mails inevitably being lost in spam filters. You don't see those, but they still exist. In my experience, quite a lot of them, especially in your case where you get mail from strangers visiting your site.
Since you can't get anywhere near reliable message delivery with email these days, I find the whole system ready for the trash.
1. Writer seems to be bemoaning their age. I have four words for the writer, IM-style: STFU.
2. Shiny new tech (IM) is actually gussied up old tech (IRC), with some new makeup, red dress, pump heels and matching faux p2p protocol. Not that there's anything wrong with IM, it's just that, um, it's been around a bit longer than people might realize. It's looking younger, but its at least several decades old.
3. Email is older still. It's showing it's age, and it's been to the doc's office a few times to get a physical (damn spam rash keeps showing up in my queues doc, canya give me a bayesian ointment to treat it?)
4. People who are not working full-time and/or in a domestic setting frankly have lots and lots of time for this. People who have been working for years and have a spouse and mortgage/rent and 2.5 kids and all the other claptrap of middle age frankly don't have alot of time for things, so it's really nice to have the message waiting for me for when I'm ready for it.
IM isn't a generational/age thing, it's a "stage of my life" thing. In a nutshell: it has nothing to do with age, get the elitist ageism out of the picture, no-one gives a crap if you use email, IM, or even smoke signals. Just get the f'n message out the door, that's all that matters.
5. Keeping email for future reference is comparatively easy. I have several people in the company I work for that have emails going back 3, 4, 5+ years (yes, their mailboxes have message counts in the 6-digit range). Keeping ongoing records for business, personal, or legal needs with an IM client is just asking for trouble. Yeah, you can save your dialogs - but can you sift through them and pick out that one message from 3 years ago? Do you even HAVE messages from 3 years ago? Do you really care to store those messages that said "I hngry lts eat"?
Move along folks, nothing to see here....
A lot of _comments_ on social networking sites could be replaced with email, however social networking sites have become something of a venue to demonstrate how popular you are - a CV of your social life of sorts. As for private messages on sites like Facebook, I presume that they're so popular because a lot of young people are more in the habit of checking their favourite sites than their emails (I know that I'm more likely to get a response to a message if I send it via bebo or facebook than by email). Maybe it's that peoples' inboxes contain mostly confirmations and other detritus that's driving people to places where they're only going to receive correspondence from real people. Or maybe it's the "OMG Ponies!!!" effect of being able to customise something to reflect the façade you'd like to exhibit.
Michael-m.co.uk - Home of Michael Mulqueen
Your post makes you seem much younger.
Is not a good thing. The problem with the Mac eliminating a floppy wasn't that they did it, but at you noted that they did it when they did. There wasn't a replacement. Even had it shipped with a CDRW, it still probably wouldn't have been a realistic replacement just since so many people still used floppies.
Phasing out old technology isn't bad, nor is embracing new technology. However it shouldn't be done just for the sake of doing it. If you get rid of something before it is really obsolete, you just piss people off and force them to buy replacements. Like I'd love to say that we are done with floppies entirely, but we aren't. I don't have one in my desktop at home, but I do at work. I simply end up needing to use it. Gateway fortunately makes them optional. They aren't normally included, but for a small fee you can get one added if you need it. While there's no reason any more to make it a default, there's also no reason to say "Nope, you can't have that." Back when the Mac eliminated floppies it was really silly since they were still used all over. I remember at the paper I worked at we had to buy USB floppies for all new Macs since the preferred method for reporters to bring in stories was on floppy. They didn't have CD writers then, they were too expensive and too new.
Likewise just jumping on new technology for its own sake is stupid. I remember when Apple upgraded to gigabit on their computers. At the time, it was an incredibly expensive proposition. Gigabit chips were in the $200-300 range bought in bulk, so it was adding a non-trivial cost to the computer. Also, it was totally worthless to most people, as a 5 port gigabit switch was north of $1000 so almost nobody has gigabit. Being "Ahead of their time," did nothing but add cost for a feature few could use. Now all computers ship with gigabit because the cost difference between a gigabit and 100mbit chip is trivial, cents at most.
There's nothing wrong with ragging on a company when they jump the gun on technology. Yes, in the future everyone may do it, but that doesn't mean it was a good decision then. I'm sure at some point in the future, computers won't have any more analogue video output, it'll be pure digital. That'll be great, when all monitors are likewise digital. However today that'd be pretty stupid since there's a large number of analogue monitors out there and it isn't expensive to add the RAMDACs needed to do the output. You'd be "ahead of your time," to eliminate analogue output, but it would rightfully earn you scorn.
Not really. If you look at Monster.com and other job boards you submit resumes to a central database. Granted smaller companies still do not have access to that sort of software. Quite often resumes and job applications will have to be forwarded multiple times to multiple levels of management and authority. In that case it is easier to have one resume on file and send links. If the resume is updated for any reason you have a central repository.
The iMac shipped with three replacements for a floppy drive. The first was the Ethernet port...remember that the "i" in the name stood for "Internet."
Sorry, but in 1998 internet connections - especially broadband ones - were *far* from ubiquitous.
The other was the USB port--flashdrives were well on their way to becoming common when the iMac hit the market.
The first flash drives weren't on the market until 2000, so they sure as hell weren't "common" in 1998. Further, since Windows didn't have built-in support for them until Windows 2000 and Windows ME, they weren't "common" until a couple of years after that. It would have been brave indeed to walk around any time before about 2002 with the assumption your USB key would just "plug and play" with the majority of computers you'd encounter.
The whole idea was that data would move across the pipe more and more, so the floppy was not necessary.
Indeed, there was nothing wrong with the idea - the problem was that it was half a decade too early.
The success of the iMac, and the way we work now, shows that was an accurate prediction.
The complaints and subsequent boom in the late 90s for USB floppy drives suggest lots of people thought the iMac's lack of any easy and compatible method to transfer data was a problem.