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.'"
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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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.
I'm only 18, I just graduated high school and I'm going into college next year. I have a friend that I like to keep in touch with, but she won't use IM or social networking sites, and I can't always know when she's available to call. Because of this, e-mail's the most reliable way to stay in touch.
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.
And then there are those of us in the real world that realize that IM, social sites, and e-mail can (and do) all work together in our everyday lives.
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.
Email is just one of many tools we use to communicate, email is not just "for old people", obviously these kids have very little experience with interacting with anyone but their own culture or within their own little world.
IM, facebook, email, etc... I expect to become more and more integrated over time, until it is a centralized unified communication center. All of them have their place until something comes along that will replace it.
then I shudder to think how old people using snail mail must be.
Email, IM, Facebook, Twitter, etc are just tools. The important thing is having a choice of tools to meet your needs.
Blog
My first email was sent through Fidonet. The always connected "Internet" was unaffordable back then.
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.
Meh.
Forums, however, do have their time and place!
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Them damned whippersnappers and their fancy "Instant Messengers" They are up to no good I tells ye, no good at all!
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!
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.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
I need Laurel (E-mail) and Hardy (Usenet) to keep in touch but my PUP net only runs at 3 Mbit/sec. Lets see, where did alt.sci.physics.spam go?
;-}
What? Me Old?!?!?
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
First had phones. And God created the answering machine and voice mail and said it was good. And hence forth all people would not answer the phone and would not return calls. Then there was the email and people worshipped it verily. Till the spammers gushed from satan's bowels. And low did the email fall. 85 percent did go to the bitbucket unopened. And in the corporation (blessed be he) email distribution lists issued forth like a plague of locusts and verily didst thou receiveth the same email with the same 9MB attachment with a header that speaketh "Me Too!" 40 times.
So there beget the IM which permitteth thou to put DNC flags and "I'm not here" status lines. Behold it was a wonder. Till the day when thine fellows ignored the status line and sent messages forth, no matter. But the upper middle managers didst avoid this plague with their Blackberries - sending forth SMS and emails 'from the car'. And God saw what he had created and was overflowing with wrath.
Being that they just about doubled my account space to 5000 MB.
My college, just like every other organization, runs on email. Yes, we use Facebook messages and IM to communicate, too. But the vast majority of our communication related to school is via email. If a group is advertising an event via Facebook, they'll post the message there and send out an email to their listserv as well. Facebook, sms, and IM are useful in personal communication but there is something more official about an email that I don't think will make it "lose out" any time soon to those alternatives. That, and you can't download your wall posts with an external program or without internet access (a problem especially at a school that encourages international travel so much).
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
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.
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.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I guess thats because kids can only hold a thought for 40 seconds. BEEEEEUUUUZZZZZZZZZZZZZZWHOOOMMP
Yes, and they spend about 38 of those seconds thinking about sex, which doesn't leave much time for communication.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
Do you mean, you don't understand why you get spam and nobody else does?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I just feel like playing "one up" with the submitter. I sent my first email in 1986...
These kids today, sheesh
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I remember "talk tty3" on a (probably unnamed) timesharing operating system running on a DEC PDP-6 in 1967. That set up a one-to-one conversation with the person at a specific TTY (teletypewriter) that could be local or remote via modem. It was the '60's equivalent of current chats such as IM.
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.
This from a guy who calls himself "screwmaster" :)
I am not surprised, Gen Y seems pretty stupid when it comes to picking trends. By only using Facebook or My Space they are limiting themselves to only communicating with people on these services. Also this story is a repeat.
In 21st century America, grandma emails YOU!!!!
My bicyles
Or get a decent e-mail client and a good set of filters and don't worry about it. I get a shit-ton of spam - probably about 40 a day or more, between 4 accounts (some more than others - surprisingly, my Hotmail account gets next to none). I never see any of it, unless I look in my spam folder. I can think of 4 times in the last couple of years where something that WASN'T spam got lumped into spam, and almost NEVER does spam get into my inbox.
The problem with Facebook is that its communication system (which is really inefficient) is also cluttered with a whole host of other time-consuming, non-message related distractions. I'll use facebook when necessary to communicate with a handful of friends who use it as their primary method of communication, but otherwise avoid it like the plague.
Email is far more useful for longer, more thoughtful conversation due to a) the word-processing features/calendar in desktop clients and 2) sweet, merciful folder organization. IM is far more convenient for quick, direct communication than facebook as it lacks the the hassle of pokes, pictures, gadgets, etc and is immediately available with the need to login and navigate to your messages.
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.
I don't quite get why this is getting so much hype. Kids use their Facebook for (web) mail and their cellphones for instant messaging. So what.
I can understand the younger generation want to use text messages and their Facebook/Xanga/Whatever, it is easy and quick, but when you enter the work place your boss isn't going to ask for a copy of that text message you sent to Richard in accounting. But then you get this marketing mindset where if something isn't showing potential growth it is dead where instead it is just evolving (for the less technically inclined).
How are these people signing up for Facebook and Myspace without email addresses? :-)
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
You are a high school kid trying to scare other high school kids about work?
My boss use IM to keep connected with his secretary when traveling. And we are a rather backward organization with regard to it use.
Nobody uses facebook here I know of, but LinkedIn is finally getting inroads.
E-mail is the backbone of the communication system, yes, but nobody gets fired for using other channels.
when did "old" become a negative? you now learn things from people younger than you? wow, things have certainly changed! I guess knowledge was over rated. now, get off my lawn.
I don't know anyone that works a desk job that could possibly function professionally without email. It's hardly "dead" and certainly isn't "only for old people". Try communicating with your clients using only Facebook or AIM. It won't work, and email isn't going anywhere.
Perhaps the real headline here should have been "social networks are for kids". While I don't think social nets are exclusively for those under 25, it would be much more accurate than "Email is only for old people".
Holy crap. What the hell is the difference if I wrote an "email" in gmail to a friend, or log into facebook to write a "message" to a friend. I'm 36, and sending blocks of text via gmail or facebook or whatever is pretty much the same for me.
Each has their own utility anyways...I mean after all would you put your email address on a resume? Well I know I sure would. My facebook account? Rather doubt it.
I think this whole thing is like talking about how everyone used Lotus-123 and then everyone moved onto Excel. A spreadsheet is a spreadsheet. And an "email", "message" or whatever is just that. Via gmail, or facebook, or SMTP or whatever. Same thing.
-=g
I'm 19 and I use email all the time. Even many of the non-nerds I go to school with use email just as much as they do text messaging.
It aint jis young wippa snappers on them Internets Facebook site. We ol foogys get to have our picture there too.! Unless you mean generation by a 50 years, watch it, boy!
I am subscribed to a couple of mailing lists, I could never manage all that traffic with webmail. Instead I use a full-featured MUA called mutt with procmail to sort things out and handle spam with SpamAssassin.
And wherever I am on the Internet, I can always ssh home and grep around all my mail archives to find something back. It's all searchable online, so to speak.
Email sucks. The best way to communicate is by writing on your personal stationery with a quill pen, then folding it and sealing it by dripping candle wax and marking that with your personal insignia ring. This is then mailed to the recipient, preferably via a service that takes a few weeks, at least, to deliver the letter.
Obligatory comment: Google is a better company than Microsoft.
It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a flying chair!
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....
I am 19 years old, and as a "liason" between slashdotters and the "younger generation," let me say that IM is DEFINITELY overtaking email for instant communication, at least for the aforementioned generation. I've been doing it since I was 15 (4 years!?), getting girls' AIM addresses, etc.
I did email one of my first girlfriends, but for every one after that it was AIM all the way. I even met one girl I went out with for almost a year through AIM...
Moral Of Story (Drunk and Unrelated):___Ask random woman friends for their (female) friends' AIM... not email. Unless you want someone over 30. Apparently. In the US. I'm done.
"Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." -Thomas Jefferson
I'd agree. I hardly ever send e-mail - the main use is registrations and the like. I use IM, Fourms and IRC for 90% of my communication, and a mobile for the rest. My friends would add a list of social networking sites to that.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
The author has a niece, she won't talk to him, his conclusion, a difference in tech.
My conclusion? His niece doesn't want to talk to him.
The proof? Note how the article carefully avoids the logical test, him using IM and then magically sparking up a relation with this niece who before wouldn't give him the time of day.
I try chat up lines in dutch, I get rejected. Conclusion, dutch is not the language to chat up girls with. Now it must be english. I carefully don't try to then use chat up lines in english and instead carefully ignore my original point and go off on a completly new rant.
The reason offcourse my chat up lines don't work has nothing to do with the language, I could be sending them in morse, it has to do with ME.
frankly I don't even believe the original author, if he was so desperate to communicate with his niece why did he not simply talk to her in person, he must have else how did he know she was using IM?
I smell an author who made something up to make a nonsense story seem real.
The nonsense? The idea that IM is something new. Geez gods man, that stuff is older then the "internet". As soon as computers started to have more then 1 user (either mainframe or networked) people came up with tools to communicate with each other. IM for when the other person is on at the same time and a mail system for when they are not.
The entire, made up, story is nothing more then the younger generation doesn't talk to the older generation. Well, duh. I am sure you can find similar brilliant stories when clay tablets were replaced by parchement.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The kids may have Facebook, but we have Blackberry. My BB has all of the "right now" of Facebook and IM, plus email everywhere.
When they grow up a little, and see what you can do when you move beyond the browser, they'll see Facebook, MySpace, et al. as the primitive time sinks they are.
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
A while ago I had a conversation with a youngster about this issue. She said she preferred IM (MSN) to email because it never took long after she opened up a new email account for her inbox to be overwhelmed with spam. On the other hand, I can also imagine that if you're part of this crowd, that even if you have no personal experience of the spammers, you're still going to start using what everybody else is using just to be able to stay in touch with them. Regardless, as soon as they grow up and get jobs, they'll be using email again because that's still what the world of business requires.
Unlike most /. readers, I remember sending paper letters. When I first got access to email (mid 90's) I didn't use it much because I had no one to communicate with.
;-) .
I now use email for everything. Spam is annoying but I have a handle on it and the value of email more than outweighs the extra effort. I regret paper letters, but I have no one to send one to. I get laughed at occasionally because I proofread email and rarely send one with misspellings or sloppy writing.
I loathe and despise IM: I'm forced to leave it running as a price of telecommuting, but I actively hate having to stop what I'm doing to receive a message and I never use it if I can possibly avoid it, except with young nimrods who don't answer email promptly.
I finally did get the cheapest cell phone I could find, they're just too useful not to have. My wife and I use maybe two hundred minutes per month; she has texting disabled, so I receive them for both of us. I've never learned to send one from the phone, though, I use gizmosms.com when I absolutely must.
I don't feel like a fossil yet: I just use what I enjoy using. I take pride in writing emails with complete sentences; I don't enjoy (even when I have the time) having "real time" conversations that actually waste huge amounts of time waiting for some cretin to IM "LOL" or
Like most people over 30, I remember a past that, in spite of all the gadgets we have now, was a better place than the brainless, illiterate, ADD-inspired constant entertainment "future" we're flying towards.
The discussion is about the current generation using IM instead of emails. I've noticed that my 14 year old daughter and her friends do everything via text messaging on their phones. I asked her a while about about the MSN's and Yahoo programs, and she told me that "none" of her friends use that anymore. It makes sense for them. They all have cell phones, and with an unlimited text message package, they can fire off a message to another phone number. They don't have to sit at the computer and have a conversation.
He who laughs last is at 300 baud.
I got introduced to on-line communications in the early 1980's. There were pretty much the same modes of communication as there are today: people had E-mail, chat (eg, write/talk), home pages (eg, finger), and discussion groups (eg, USENET, mailing lists). Being in a college town, we could even order books and pizza online (what else do you need?). Some people would dial in, some would connect from work, and some had dedicated lines.
The web has added more graphics, more porn, more spam, and more people, but the basic functionality and technology hasn't changed much.
I'm tired of heared this "under 25" crap. I'm 41 and for the most part I loathe what e-mail has become. This is what I had about e-mail; 1.) It's inherently insecure and measures people could take to make it secure are rarely if ever taken. 2.) most of the direct e-mail I get from people I know is stupid chain letters, links to videos I saw years ago,etc. 3.) After years of alternatives people still send honking large attachments that are not meant for e-mail, even those with fast connection. 4.) Phishing schemes 5.) and many more I much prefer the collaborative environments of things like Basecamp, Instant messaging, text messaging e-mail in of itself is an ok idea but the technology needs a serious upgrade. It seems when other things have progressed e-mail has been stagnant. Why can't we tie e-mail in with a secure ftp system so attachments are sucurely sent to an ftp server and links are automatically created like the way Twitter does with long e-mail addresses? Why do people have to go through the convulted process of getting certificates and making sure their receivers have the same thing for decryption. This may sound silly but I rarely see viruses in my e-mail give us a Snopes filter to keep out Aunt Helen's panic e-mails about Proctor and Gamble and the satanic church, etc.
We've taken a communication endpoint and turned it into a portable, cheap, massed-produced, (relatively) easy-to-use device. Cheap enough and useful enough for parents to give to their kids. The kids validate the device's usefulness by actually using the thing, and they use it all the time because they can. IM on a cell phone is useful to them and they don't have to block out a bunch of time to sit in front of a terminal to use it.
Slashdot readers sit in front of a computer a lot throughout the day. When we want to communicate with someone electronically we use either email or a chat client, depending on our need at the time, and we can choose the appropriate tool because we can. Exactly like the kids and their phone-based IM clients. Personally, I use email when I want to communicate something to someone and use chat when I want to communicate with someone (have a conversation).
Anyway, this evolution will probably continue in ways we can't really forecast. And it will all be good, for those people who use it.
Once these kids get out into the real world they will see why everything can not nor should be done via IM. Email has it's own virtual paper trail. I have all my work email going back 3 years - when someone questions me on a decision related to a project, I can go back to the exact conversation via Google Desktop in a matter of minutes. Sure, IM clients have logs, but from my experience they are too disorganized and unreliable for anything work-related.
Okay first this guy makes an assumption then proceeds to base his premise on the idea that his first assumption was true. He also poorly constructs his title by saying email is "dead" but says the younger generation can't imagine life with "email only." Okay, so they are using email but are using these other means too? duh! Oh and lets assume the older generation isn't using Facebook. I have no idea whether they are or not but it bears looking into.
If the younger generation is augmenting email with Facebook and MySpace then email is alive and kicking. This is a poorly written and poorly argued article from an logic standpoint. Furthermore he appears to base his initial assumption on the fact that people aren't using Yahoo! mail and Hotmail. Well, Hotmail sucks...period. Yahoo! is a spam magnet. So it's not so much that people are abandoning email its just that the younger generation has little tolerance for spam and sucky email interfaces.
OTOH why can't they see clear to abandon MySpace given how poorly most pages there are constructed? Now that is a puzzle.
In 1965 I had a military surplus model 15 teletype machine connected to my shortwave ham rig through a "Terminal Unit" (TU) which is what we would call today, a modem. I chatted with other hams all over the world on 20 meters and locals on 80. I even had an unattended mode that only turned on the motor of the teletype machine when a TTY signal appeared on the calling frequency. So, in a sense it could function as email, although the message was read by everyone who monitored that frequency with the appropriate gear so perhaps it was more like a bulletin board.
Have any of you read "The Victorian Internet"? It's a book about the telegraph system, which, among the operators, was an instant messaging system, too.
I'm in the older demographic, obviously from my above comment, and I dislike IM and chat very much. It takes too much concentration. I'd much rather take my time in making a reply. I actually have a MySpace page, just to see what it was all about. I don't use it.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
It's not so much about what the technology is. Email is NOT dead. It certainly has issues (spam). Instant messaging serves a different purpose than Email.
My grandparents used to send mail (hand written on paper) via the postman, to each other and their other friends, way back long ago. My parents didn't do that ... they had telephones!
The important thing to understand here is the difference between communicating and socializing. Email and IM serve their respective needs. Email is lousy at socializing in real time because, being designed as a store and forward system, there can be time delays. And in social circles, a few seconds delay can ruin the whole exchange.
Some day in the future we'll figure out how to do brain implants and exchange thoughts in groups. Kids will be sitting around wherever while their brains will be having mental intercourse. Eventually the whole world will be a single collective.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This is crazy.
I send clients and associates files by email and most all business correspondence is now email - not chat. If you want to chat with a friend go ahead and send a quick text message, but the real business world works on email.
Email did replace the fax - haven't used that much over the past couple years. Email has reduced the number of phone calls - but in the real world we still talk. And for many of my clients, it's the preferred way of doing business - you don't leave a paper trail of everything ever said.
Am I too old and cynical yet?
Back when I was 15, in 1998, we got the internet. Emails at that point in time were this newfangled thing which had the "wow factor" and it's fair to say that in the coming years I used it quite a lot. But I feel its purpose, for me at least, has changed somewhat since.
These days, I use my personal email account for any contact I have with businesses and online stores etc. I also use it for notifications, such as to tell me I have a new message on Facebook, or to notify me that an item I ordered has now shipped. I also subscribe to a small number of newsletters and marketing emails related to mobile telecommunications (both my work field and a hobby) and to some online stores who often have special offers on which I may be interested in. Actual communication is done via online services such as Facebook and Bebo (a British semi-equivalent) and text messaging. The only times I really use email to communicate with others is when I'm corresponding with older members of the family.
My work inbox is a completely different story however. Email is the medium of choice in the office and pretty much everything goes via email. I do use it to "chat" to other people, primarily because I don't generally use IM at all and it's really easy to just hit reply in Outlook.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
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.
"news" about how a guy felt 11 years ago are the reason why I'm close to deleting
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
I except the flamebait label, sure. But the truth is that people are investing in a major way in spam and bot nets. Spam continues as long as email as we know it exists. Just because you block spam by the TB each day means nothing. It's using not gone, but swept under the carpet. But, that truth doesn't seem to bother people. To make them give up we would really have to give up on email as we know it. It's time email was replaced with something that works better. I don't have that idea, but someone does.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
Clearly I've been modded by a spammer.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
WTF? Seriously, how is "Over 25" "old"? Considering the average life span is up in the 70's or 80's now... uhg.. I'm not old damnit! *shakes fist*
Can all fish swim?
In my company my direct report is halfway across the world. It annoys the hell out of me when my boss or a collegue are never available on IM, sometimes I need to probe for information and e-mail or phones just do not cut it.
:) But I find phoning during working hours rude - it always interrupts the recipient and is hard to ignore.
:)
However e-mail is also necessary, it has a kind of contractual character that nothing else does. If fact I know one company that was trying to forbid e-mail for anything that did not require the recpient to follow up on something.
And nothing beats the phone for telling if someone is lying or hiding something, or just plain scared shitless
SMS gets peoples attention the fastest in a non-intrusive way. And is great for traveling - they get delivered as soon as your other party lands. Or figuring out where someone is right now.
So I use all 4 pretty heavily - and I am definitly not under 25
Something gmail's had for years. I love how you guys all portray webmail as if it is some area of hopelessness and anarchy. It's quite easy to get things under control. I have over 1100 filters and pretty much everything is multi-labelled correctly automatically, including lists-which-don't-go-to-my-inbox and such. My first email? 1991.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Surveys suggest that people who use IM's have the endless amounts of spare time required to fill out the ceaseless surveys asking if email is dead yet.
-Styopa
Man, the hype on social networking is out of control these days. Let's see, in the US: the landline phone is only for the uninitiated the tax is only for the poor the Zune is only for the retarded Oh, wait... the last one might by true...
You don't want to interrupt your concentration. You just type in the computer, and it's easy. If you get up and walk to the next cubicle, your concentration is ruined. But in this case, it's ruined also for both of you: you and the person you walked to.
Switching from one task to another, even if you're doing both on a computer, is still a break in concentration. This is why people who really need to concentrate work in offices with doors. This is why libraries require patrons to be quiet. The ability to shut out the rest of the world for significant periods of time is how tasks requiring real concentration get done.
In short, multitasking is a productivity killer.
Continuous interruptions (like IM) are one of the enemies of serious concentration. That's why IM sees widespread use in social communication where individual focus is unimportant, but little use among those who need long periods of concentration to do serious work. For the latter, intermittent communication (like email) allows for longer periods of focused concentration.
E-mail isn't "dying" or "becoming obsolete". IM, SMS, etc are not replacing e-mail. They server different purposes.
Back in the pre-computer days, if you needed to reach someone right away to chat about whatever, you picked up the phone. Instant, synchronous, real-time communication.
If you just wanted to update someone on your life and didn't need an instant reply, then you sat down, wrote a letter and mailed it to them. Eventually they'd receive it, read it, and send a reply back. More in-depth, and asynchronous.
And so it is with digital communications. If you need to reach someone right away, then you send them an IM or SMS. Instant, synchronous, pretty much real-time communication. Or, if you don't really want a reply, but just want to update people on what you are doing, then you update your online profile (wherever that might be).
If you don't need an instant reply, or you have more to say than will fit in 80 characters, then you sit down, write an e-mail, and send it to them. Eventually they receive it, read, and reply. Asynchronous communication.
Sometimes one method works better than the other. One is not replacing the other. They server different purposes, have different uses, and are used at different times.
It's not like this is a new thing, either. Different age groups use different modes of communications.
Nobody is going to send you important communication to your myspace account. IM is great (though not a replacement for email). Social networking sites supporting private messaging have been around for decades, and they'll be around for many more, but they're also not going to replace email. People (even young people) are quite capable of using more than one communication medium. Sure, we don't use email to communicate with our friends (because we prefer IM), but that doesn't mean that we don't use email. Talking to my brother? Sure, IM works. Getting an inquiry about my resume? Better check my email. Old people must be stupid if they think young people aren't using email.
Just because teens use IM more than e-mail doesn't mean that e-mail is becoming obsolete. Ten years ago when I was in high school I was using IM and chat a lot too, way more than e-mail. Yeah, short instant messages are better suited to a teen's social life. Big surprise. Give them ten years. Then we'll have another genius who notices the trend and writes another article about the death of e-mail.
Sorry for the snide remark, but seriously isn't the human brain the best filter? Use it, not a service then you don't risk missing anything.
I will not be a slave to everyone else's whim and answer the phone, an IM, text message, or anything else.
If they want something they can leave a message. I'll answer it when I have time. If I do others the courtesy
of leaving a message for them and they don't even bother to answer I let them know about their bad manners. Personally.
Why are you posting this ill considered crap as if it were news?
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
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." The other was the USB port--flashdrives were well on their way to becoming common when the iMac hit the market. Either one was a superior way of moving data compared to the old 1.44 MB floppy. On top of that it had a modem.
The whole idea was that data would move across the pipe more and more, so the floppy was not necessary. The success of the iMac, and the way we work now, shows that was an accurate prediction.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I've used both webmail (squirrel, gmail, yahoo, hotmail, and even older ones) and clients (outlook, outlook express, pine).
I've found that for personal applications (non-work environment), webmail is king. But for work Outlook is king.
There's a few major things about webmail that make it good for personal use: client/service is usually free, client is ubiquitous, and all data is maintained on the server. The bad parts are composition generally isn't as good, integration with other services is also poor, and there are certain compatibility issues (the email won't come up as expected).
Now for the clients, there are some good things as well: composition is generally consistent and better, integration (especially on outlook) is great, and the client (exchange) can be left on and receive/send emails almost like IMs. The bad things are the data tends to get shoved to the client and deleted from the server (except imap) and you have to reinstall and configure the client on every new computer. Most workplaces allievate the later by either giving you a laptop or having the corporate email service configure itself along with the user account. But you're rarely going to find that outside of work.
The interesting thing is that I've actually found that pine was probably my favorite of everything depsite it's text interface. What I liked about pine was it had qualities of both webmail and the client. Like webmail it ran on a server so you could get to it from almost anywhere that had telnet. But like the clients, it was setup to manage email and other services like a client rather than a server or service loaded with ads and other unnecessary things.
How do you know that?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
If they're using email effectively it won't matter whether you send them an email or an IM, they'll get it just as quickly. It's got nothing to do with IM being better for getting people's attention, it's got to do with them simply not wanting to use email.
I've worked with people who insist on IM, instead of email, and they generally ignore their email, often for days. So I use whatever they want to use, but if I'm busy I'll turn the IM and my email program BOTH off. I'm just as accessible either way, and just as inaccessible, as well.
The mods were on crack.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
sixdegrees.com (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SixDegrees.com) preceded all these "social networks" by ten years. And like sixdegrees, you cannot count on any of these propietary "networks" not to reach a point when they decide to close the business and sell the acquired info.
Email, on the other hand, is an open standard that does not belong to anyone, and people and businesses can count on it to work reasonably well for them if their application stay close enough to the standard. Email is guaranteed to work in the future so it will stay.
Email for communications is as outdated as sex is for reproduction!
I have almost complete control over how my email is handled through multiple addresses and through scripts that filter my email any way I wants it. All this costs next to nothing.
I cannot disconnect a phone or IM client selectively except for very limited options such as whitelist+blacklist. I have no way in my phone to junk SMS spam so I cannot use SMS as a means of receiving important messages.
I would have liked to allow my students to contact me through Skype, but that would mean that I would either have to let them see I'm available whenever I want to be available to my family members, or I would have to have a separate account just for that and I would not be able to be available to my family and friends on my main account when I make myself available to my students on the account I would advertise to them (because the proprietary client or perhaps the protocol itself doesn't support being connected through multiple accounts at the same time. So even two family members sharing a computer cannot have both accounts "available" at the same time). And then of course it's just one proprietary network. And you have to use all of them to be connected to everyone. So I use none.
I guess flat availability ("available"/"unavailable") is good for teenagers that use IM or whatever just to communicate with "friends" or perhaps with some teachers, but when it comes to having many different types of contacts it fails.
Email with IMAP idle means I can respond to email in about the same amount of time it takes to respond to a phone call or IM message, but I am in full control.
... and have for several years. I use IM as a way to send a quick, non-urgent question to someone, rather than call them on the phone -- it allows them to answer at their leisure (like E-mail), but allows a "disposable" conversation to pick up steam, without having 15 messages cluttering my inbox which I then need to destroy. It also allows ME to ask a question which I Don't expect an immediate answer to, and then get back to working -- or possibly hold multiple IM conversations with different coworkers if necessary. Multitasking over IM seems much easier than on email or phones.
... it just doesn't seem the same.)
Don't get me wrong -- when something gets complicated, the phone gets picked up, as talking is much easier than typing. (I do dislike that the phone is not logged, whereas my IM and E-mail are all automatically keeping logs of everything I send/receive... oh well.) I also use e-mail, if the person is out of the office, or if the communication seems to have more "importance" than what IM would have -- so that there's a more permanent record. (Technically, my Trillian logs are just as permanent, but
When I worked at the university, all of us IMed each other, as our coworkers were in different rooms, sometimes down the hall.
apologies for offtopic post,
but to kklein (from a previous discussion, sorry i don't have another way to respond) - i definitely agree that Tokyo is not Japan! I meant only 1) when people outside of Japan talk about Japan, they often (wrongly) mean Tokyo, and 2) technology is not limited to personal computer technology - Japan uses lots of interesting technology in agriculture, transportation, energy, and communication - and that is not limited to Tokyo.
forgive my off-topicness - but to bring it back, even if just a little... email (if you count SMS) is very very young in Japan, it seems...
Email may be more boring than Facebook, but it's a heck of a lot more organized. When these kids go to work, they will need to flag and prioritize and sort and search their messages to keep up with their job. And suddenly, email will be really useful, and they'll use it.
If the messages you're sending are so trivial that you never need to find them again, IM and social sites are fine. Otherwise, they're useless.
And the Face book generation can't imagine a life without Viruses, Spyware and other Nasties. Not that email is any better, but if you have half a brain it is.
Given that the first email systems appeared in the mid- to late sixties, does this mean that we're soon to hear about exciting forays into the brand new worlds of the personal computer, VHS tapes, and disco?