In The US, Email Is Only For Old People 383
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.'"
Just the beginning (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [apple.com], IM clients of many flavors, tweets [twitter.com] 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.
personal experience says no freaking way (Score:5, Insightful)
Spam ruined email (Score:5, Insightful)
social networks... (Score:5, Insightful)
DIfferent use cases (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
No biggie - they're young and will find out... (Score:5, Insightful)
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
What has changed in the last 30 years? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Email reshaped the company world (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Mod parent up. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Spam ruined email (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:personal experience says no freaking way (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Email reshaped the company world (Score:5, Insightful)
I realize you're probably a nerd due to the fact that you're post on Slashdot but the vast majority of people who use e-mail in the corporate world cannot put anything on a FTP server, webserver, or anywhere else. That type of shit is for the IT department and I hope that they honestly have better things to do than place some lame Excel spreadsheet used like a database up so that three people can access the data contained in it once.
I have access to a webserver, FTP server, whatever and you know what? I still send attachments because it makes more sense for 99% of what I (and everyone else) attaches.
Re:Just the beginning (Score:3, Insightful)
I couldn't help think about my boss' new MacBook Pro. He got the 2.4 Ghz model with maxed RAM and all the upgrades. It must have cost him over $5000, but boy that thing screams. But 10 years from now, I imagine it'll be much like the G3 iMac is today. A crappy old relic that can't run anything at a decent speed and has very little resale value.
I think we who work in the IT field often take for granted the technological leaps and bounds that are made, and often times we don't think very far ahead. The G3 iMac was derided for not having a floppy drive. Sounds pretty ridiculous now, doesn't it? I love the little moments like that, where I think about the possibilities for the future, when teenagers are mocking us for still using IM software and someone reading an archive of this post says to themselves "$5000 for a MacBook Pro? That's hilarious!". (Yes, I realize there are some who would say that now, but you see the point I'm trying to make). That sense of wonder is why I, and probably many of you, got into IT in the first place.
Re:Email reshaped the company world (Score:1, Insightful)
And don't give me BS about mail server or network overload. I've never seen it happen. If it's happening on your network, increase your capacity. Mail attachments are quite simply a better user experience, hands down. Just because they are slightly technically inferior doesn't mean you should get upset at people for using them. It means you should try to make it work better technically to accommodate your users.
Not more limited. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Privacy is for old people (Score:2, Insightful)
The other side... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Just the beginning (Score:5, Insightful)
The G3 iMac was derided for not having a floppy drive. Sounds pretty ridiculous now, doesn't it?
The G3 iMac was derided for not having a _replacement_ for a floppy drive. Had apple shipped them with CD writers (not even CDRWs), there would have been no complaints. But at the time, it made getting information off an iMac difficult without buying more hardware - not an insignificant issue for a computer with a significant customer based expected to be in the education market (either schools or students).
In the US, Email is only for People With Jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Spam ruined email (Score:1, Insightful)
If you publicly list your Gmail address, even it will be spammed.
Re:I've seen the shift to Facebook as of late (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:Email reshaped the company world (Score:1, Insightful)
However... Yes, sometimes attaching files to an email DOES make sense.
Re:personal experience says no freaking way (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it's because my computer history is very different than most people my age, or maybe because it's just logical that something as easy to use and as widespread as email isn't going to go away anytime soon, while other services have either come and gone or never caught on in the first place. Pretty much every internet-connected device can handle email plus one other protocol, but it's email rather than that one other protocol that's on EVERYTHING. Like so many other things, it's not really perfect for any one application (though if it had been encrypted from the start, I'd say otherwise; unfortunately, it's really too late to get encryption everywhere), but by and large it works well enough for just about anything.
Re:Spam ruined email (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:DIfferent use cases (Score:4, Insightful)
In the old days, email actually worked. It was delivered to your box, and comsat was there to biff you when it arrived. I even had my beloved xface running at the edge of my screen so I could see the incoming and catch the ones from the five people I cared about. And in that environment, we surely did use email to arrange lunch; it was quicker than shouting down the hall.
Then Microsoft figured out that the Internet wasn't going to go away. And suddenly it was all DHCP and POP and all the applications that used to blow started to suck—sorry, those that used to push started to pull—and the Internet stopped feeling like the Internet and turned into what we have today, a kind of UUCP on steroids, where communication doesn't happen until the next scheduled contact time, because an IP number no longer successfully identifies a node and everyone lives in fear, cowering behind firewalls and running no daemons.
And by now email is little better than snail mail, and the interfaces are worse (no xface or deliver scripts in Windows!) and it sucks, and of course people are looking for alternatives so that they can arrange lunch and communicate selectively with the people they care about.
So, I know I'm an old fart by now, but in the old days, before Microsoft Rule and the Eternal September, the technology used to work. I'm not making this up....
Re:Spam ruined email (Score:4, Insightful)
Um.
At this point, haven't you essentially reinvented the email wheel?
I don't see how this hypothetical system is substantially different from email. Well, to be fair, "email plus presence" (see: tightly integrated email/IM systems like Gmail/Gtalk or Mail.app/iChat).
Note also that whatever it is about email that "the kids" don't like anymore, they'll also grow to dislike about "IM plus offline messages plus mailboxes plus attachments".
Re:Not more limited. (Score:4, Insightful)
On a related note, I text message like there's no tomorrow, but mostly with my girlfriend. I can't imagine using that as a substitute for e-mail. Especially in a work environment.
you don't see the lost emails (Score:3, Insightful)
Since you can't get anywhere near reliable message delivery with email these days, I find the whole system ready for the trash.
Re:Just the beginning (Score:2, Insightful)
Why didn't you show him the phone bill, alongside the CompuServe bill? :)
Re:Just the beginning (Score:1, Insightful)
Stupid Slate Article Designed for Web Hits (Score:5, Insightful)
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....
Re:personal experience says no freaking way (Score:5, Insightful)
I have yet to understand why anyone ever wants to use the internal messaging on websites rather than email. Having to waste my time logging into a large number of websites in order to read and reply to messages instead of them all landing in my inbox is crazyness...
Not only that, but when using email I get to use one well designed user interface of my choice, whereas messaging on websites, forums, etc require me to use a different (usually badly designed and slow) UI on every site.
Re:I've seen the shift to Facebook as of late (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:My Two Cents As A Teenager (Score:2, Insightful)
Your post makes you seem much younger.
Re:Just the beginning (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess the main problem is that it advertises that you're online. (And whilst you can be invisible, people then, unlike a phone, will assume you're offline, so that's no good either.)
Re:personal experience says no freaking way (Score:3, Insightful)
And "being ahead of your time" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Just the beginning (Score:3, Insightful)
More importantly very few people were online all the time, most were using dialup which meant their other primary method of being contacted was blocked. If they did have an internet connection at work it mostly to be mail gateway. So I think for a lot of people when they first experienced IM they knew like them most of the people they knew to send a message to were doing something unimportant and would not mind the interuption, just by their being signed in to the IM service in the first place. They were if anything doing something like posting to a news group or reading about what Beenie-bady was comming out next.
The technical and socail landscape around being "online" has changed remarkably for most people since that time and I think the soical behavior around IM specifically is just a little behinde those other transitions.
Re:Just the beginning (Score:3, Insightful)
One of these things, to you, is pretty abstract. If your boss isn't happy about you having limited availability on nights and weekends that might have an affect on future income levels, or it might not. And this might matter to you, or it might not. On the other hand, you know for sure that when you leave for vacation you can actually relax, since you'll only get called if it's really important.
The bottom line is: you have talents and you've spent a significant amount of time and effort cultivating them into useful and marketable skills. Why should you suffer for this by working longer hours than anyone else, and by being on call all the time? When you are the best person for a job you have bargaining power, and every right to use it; or you could sacrifice now in hopes to improve things in the future. I would just say to make sure that you will eventually benefit, personally, in a way that's truly important to you for all those extra hours. If you're working on a project you really believe in the success of the project could be one of those ways. Most people, at any given time, are not, and are working because someone else is going to benefit financially from the work they do. They're just getting part of the cut.
The specific field I work in doesn't usually require much on-call time outside of normal hours. The specific job I have only rarely requires working long days, weekends or holidays (and there isn't a company culture that expects them either). I don't own a cell phone. My commute is a 35-minute bike ride. My co-workers are cool people. I live in a great city (and, moreover, it's the city I want to live in). None of this is an accident. I have plenty of friends that make more money than me, have more desk/office space, work on cooler technology. I wouldn't trade my situation with any of theirs. Not because their situations are bad (they all seem to be doing OK, even the ones doing consulting or working for investment houses with ridiculous work schedules), but because mine is a result of actively working for what's important to me. Always making a few mistakes, never quite perfect, but always taking note of what makes me happy, what I really care about. Career for its own sake is just not one of those things.
Re:Try working - as in, a job - without email (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh, bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
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.