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.'"

Comments

Re:Just the beginning

[plover]

We were also using both instant messaging and email in the late 1970s. This was on teletypes connected to a mainframe. It was great as a social device, but it really took all our concentration. Due to the nature of the hardware and connection, we never had multiple processes working simultaneously, at least from the user's perspective.

Modern IM using asynchronous interruption (cell phones or separate clients) makes the current experience "different." I can choose to ignore my IM client much easier than I could when it was my only running application, synchronous in nature. The old client was much more like a conversation, one which you could end by disconnecting. Current clients are much more intrusive, and people expect more responsiveness out of you at all hours of the day.

Hmm... not my experience

[ylikone]

I was doing web development work from home (for the past 6 years actually) and I recently returned to full-time work in a small company and found that all these young people actually use IM ... all the time... even though they may be sitting in a cubicle next to the other person. Email is used to communicate with the clients but inner office is completely IM. I find it strange but I am getting used to it. Times seem to have changed.

Re:Hmm... not my experience

[houghi]

I used to work at a company some ten years ago and we used Yahoo Messenger all the time. We had email and phones and we could easily walk to each other, yet Yahoo Messenger was much easier a LOT of the time. If you needed a short answer on a short question, you would just send the message and have a further conversation if needed.

This all while on the phone with somebody else. It realy held down the noiselevel, because instead of people shouting questions to each other, you just send the message. In about 95% of the cases you could see the person. Sometimes you would see that the person was on the phone himselef and would thus be doing two things at a time.

Unfortunatly no other company I have worked for since has been willing or daring to implement it or even try it out. A big loss for them, especialy as you can now just set up your own server, so no contact is possible with the ousde world.

I highly recomend it. It is NOT a replacement for email. In fact it is not a replacement for anything. It is just an aditional tool to communicate with your fellow workers.

They use MSN at my work actually.

[Repossessed]

It's the best way for people on the other side of the office to talk to each other. We also have dedicated chat clients for use with talking to specific people (namely those with some authority) for more official work. And the conversations tend to be a fair sight more professional than in person stuff, thanks to the records that such tools create,

You're projecting too much the attitude people bring to the tools, which have nothing to do with the tools themselves.

I've seen the shift to Facebook as of late

[Critical_]

I've seen the shift of a lot of non-serious non-real-time discussions to sites such as Facebook. I find this rather irritating because I only get a notification email in my regular Inbox informing me to go check Facebook instead of the message itself. I also can't archive and refer to old messages which may have event information, phone numbers, etc. due to the lack of advanced features on those sites. I understand this method of logging in generates ad revenue for the site, but when I'm on the road I'd like to respond via push-email in my down-time instead of having to find a public wifi access point.

Although I'm sure this will violate Facebook's TOS in some way, an existing project like FreePOPS or a server-side daemon could be modified to fetch messages in my Facebook and Myspace inboxes and move them to my regular email account. Then they could be pushed to my phone and archived in my local email application.

Facebook needs to consider allowing POP/IMAP access to the inbox and only allow messages to be sent to other Facebook members via the same method. Facebook already forces verification of accounts via college email addresses or via mobile phone text messages which helps cut down spam and viruses. This allows a very large white-list of sorts with a global address book. With more businesses becoming present in the Facebook world, legitimate corporate advertising could be allow/blocked simply by altering account privacy settings. I see it as a win-win for Facebook.

IM sucks

[Reality Master 101]

More like, "IM is for kids with unlimited time", rather than email is for old people. For awhile, I used IM a lot, then I figured out what an incredible time sink it was. I changed my account and gave it only to a few select people, and even then it's only used when someone wants to ask me a quick question or give me a "come here a second".

I suspect that rather than be some generational thing that only the new generation "gets it", it'll be abandoned by that same generation once they grow up and get real lives.

Re:Just the beginning

[SetupWeasel]

IM programs and cell phones can be disconnected too, and I am beginning to use that feature more often. The problem I see is that others expect these things to be on all the time. Not much of a problem for a friend, but when your boss gets angry it becomes more troublesome. That was the reason I didn't get a cell phone until 2005.

Re:Just the beginning

[fermion]

There really is no real difference between these types of communications, only opportunity costs. Bandwidth with now cheap so there is no longer any reason to not have useless drivel eat up a few parts of a percent of the transmissions. The same for computer.

Look at the telephone. Telephone time is now so cheap that people spend the entire day with a receiver on their ear chatting. It is any worse that the one telephone in the house? Not really, only in opportunity costs that one could be doing something else, perhaps more valuable.

If one has to pay for communication, then one thinks about what one has to say. if one is not paying, then just talks. So what is happening is simply that the kids are not having to do what many very older people were trained to do, which is not to tie up a line for too long. It is now a non issue. Everyone in the house has at least one phone. Everyone in the house has a computer. The resources are not scarce, so there is no need to ration them. As long as resources remain plentiful, there is no problem.