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.'"

Re:Just the beginning

[plover]

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

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

Re:Spam ruined email

[garcia]

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.

You know, I have an e-mail address ([e-mail]) listed on my website that gets about 12,000 visits a day and I wouldn't doubt if many of those harvest it for spam. While I get almost 0 spam (with blacklisting and SpamAssassin) on my main address (which I hadn't received a single spam to before a year ago) GMail handles the 19 or so spams I get to my website address w/o an issue. In addition to the website posting I also use that account for all the garbage sign ups on the web and yet I only get 19 a day at most.

Spam hasn't ruined e-mail as you have said, it's just that other technology works a fuckload better for most communication. For most of what I do I expect an immediate response and people treat e-mail like voicemail -- they check it frequently but not frequently enough. More modern technology solves that.

Hmm... not my experience

[ylikone]

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

They use MSN at my work actually.

[Repossessed]

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

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

Re:Spam ruined email

[PyroMosh]

I only have two things in my gmail inbox. Spam and messages from my web host (since my main email resides on their servers, if there's an outage, or something, it makes sense for them to have an alternate service address).

I never understood people who say they don't get spam on gmail. Since I don't use it except as a backup, I've never given my address to anyone save for my web host and yet, here is all this spam.

I've seen the shift to Facebook as of late

[Critical_]

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

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

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

IM sucks

[Reality Master 101]

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

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

What is there to understand?

[p3d0]

I never understood people who say they don't get spam on gmail.

I never get spam on GMail. The whole time I've had it (2.5 years), it has put about four spams in my inbox, and thousands in my spam folder.

Do you mean, you don't understand why you get spam and nobody else does?

Re:What has changed in the last 30 years?

[Kjella]

Well what they call "IM" isn't really IM anymore, the way you divide it. With offline messages you pretty much have email, except you can't send attachments if the recipient isn't online though there's no reason that couldn't be implemented too. Group chats replace all the ad hoc chatrooms, though there's still room for forums. All in one place with whitelisting, blacklisting, status notifications, smileys, integrations with webcams and so on and so forth. People still send "email", they just don't use email the protocol.

Re:Just the beginning

[SetupWeasel]

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

Re:Just the beginning

[fermion]

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

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

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

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Just the beginning

[h4rm0ny]

Predictions about the future are often wildly off. And predictions that progress in the future is going to make everything we have today look like a child's toy, might not be an exception. I'm typing this on a single core Semperon 2.2GHz machine with DDR (not DDR2) RAM and on-board graphics. That's very far from archaic, but it was low end when I bought it and that was several years ago. It manages pretty much all that I need at present. I am intending to upgrade it soon, but that's only because I have some specific programming requirements and even then I'm just going to plonk down the cash for an Athlon 64 X2 4000 or therabouts (costing £35). For most people there isn't a reason to upgrade. We've reached a plateau in requirements. We're even seeing it in some areas in software with Vista offering nothing new to customers and being rejected (offers more to developers, but that's not relevant here). The new MS Office suite is actually going backwards in quality as far as most are concerned.

I think the changes people are most interested in will be in power-consumption, size and noise. People wont be so much amazed that our graphics were only X good, or that we managed to make do with only 2GB of RAM, but that we tolerated great big fan-heavy bricks underneath all our desks and fat 8" wide wireless routers. Storage and bandwidth (outside and inside the home) will keep accelerating. We still have a great thirst for those and increases in these will help make different models of software possible (the remote office, our personal files hosted). But brute processing power? It'll go up, but we may not be so willing to pay for it. It would be interesting if Moore's Law finally failed not due to technology, but due to lack of interest. :)

Re:Stupid Slate Article Designed for Web Hits

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, I'm old: 49. It'll be 50 next month. I got set up for IM several years ago when I was just starting out on the 'net with AOL. Hated it. Friends were always interrupting my workflow (I'm a musician and practice in front of my computer). Now, with all my Macs wirelessly connected, my 1st and 5th gen iPods and iPhone. I NEVER use IM because it's for silly young idiots. Grownups have better things to do with their time.

Re:Spam ruined email

[Blakey Rat]

I never understood people who say they don't get spam on gmail.

They must be lying! Those bastards! It's inconcievable that they're telling the truth and that you're the minority.

Since I don't use it except as a backup, I've never given my address to anyone save for my web host and yet, here is all this spam.

Probably because you don't have any actual emails in there, Google has no way of determining which are spam or not. If you used the email account, I'm sure it would do a much better job.