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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.
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!
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'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.
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 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.
How are these people signing up for Facebook and Myspace without email addresses? :-)
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
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....
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.