Kids Say Email is Dead 444
An anonymous reader writes "'E-mail is, like, soooo dead' is the headline at News.com, where a piece looks at youth attitudes towards communication mediums. A group of teenage internet business entrepreneurs confessed that they really only use email to 'talk to adults'. Primarily, these folks are using social networks to communicate. 'More and more, social networks are playing a bigger role on the cell phone. In the last six to nine months, teens in the United States have taken to text messaging in numbers that rival usage in Europe and Asia. According to market research firm JupiterResearch, 80 percent of teens with cell phones regularly use text messaging. Catherine Cook, the 17-year-old founder and president of MyYearbook.com, was the lone teen entrepreneur who said she still uses e-mail regularly to keep up with camp friends or business relationships. Still, that usage pales in comparison to her habit of text messaging. She said she sends a thousand text messages a month.'"
muggles still use e-mail, mail, phones, etc. (Score:5, Insightful)
This only says what youth does, not what they'll use as adults. I'm guessing for more durable and more effective communications the youth of today will opt for something more substantial than "c u 2nit".
Youth today do what they do because it's there, not because it's going to replace traditional communications.
When "we" were young, we passed notes on pieces of paper. The girls passed messages by lip-reading (never understood how they were so good at that). I never saw any articles predicting "note passing", and lip-reading becoming the protocol de jour. If we'd had text messaging, we'd have done it too.
Consider from the article:
That seems to contradict the main thesis of the article. Basically, for important things like business and/or sponsors Martina uses e-mail? The e-mail is not dead, or as the article claims like, soooo dead.Text messaging, social web sites serve a purpose, not replace one. (This is akin the predictions recently "laptops to replace desktops".)
Critical thought, thorough discussion, deep understanding -- none are much served by the text messaging medium. (e-mail doesn't do much for them either.)
They "only use e-mail to 'talk to adults'". They'll use e-mail and more traditional forms of communication when they become adults. It doesn't mean they'll stop using the text messaging and other forms, it just means they'll need the more traditional forms.
i cld b wrng. i hope im not.
Re:muggles still use e-mail, mail, phones, etc. (Score:4, Insightful)
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(Of course, encrypting the message body itself also works, but that's more of a pain than most people are willing to deal with.)
Re:muggles still use e-mail, mail, phones, etc. (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I just use MSN & Jabber for stuff now. My inboxes are spam ridden hellholes, and its just not worth it.
I actually do think Email's days are numbered. But thats not because of social networking. Its because of fucking spammers. Getting 600+ emails a day *AFTER* its been purged by spamassassin aint fun (I turned it off once and got nearly 2000 emails a day in the inbox. Granted its a 10 year old email address.
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Re:muggles still use e-mail, mail, phones, etc. (Score:4, Informative)
gpg really is what makes it secure. still, ssl is a plus. strangely gmail defaults to having it off... weird. and they don't do imap, which makes me sad.
but anyway, the whole social network thing largely exists so that the owners of those servers get to read your messages -- and let future employers, etc, read them too, for a fee. and they don't really do much that people couldn't set up on their own (like, have everyone make an rss feed of their life and aggregate it, is an example).
Re:muggles still use e-mail, mail, phones, etc. (Score:5, Insightful)
But there ARE additional benefits! (Score:5, Insightful)
What you're missing is that social network messaging solves THE problem that email has. You know who sent you the message. And barrier to spam is higher than with email.
Lots of other email-like functionality is missing, but the authentication issue (sender and receiver have authenticated themselves to a third party) has been fixed.
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Yes they've authenticated with a third party, but it doesn't mean I know them or want them to message me. I get myspace message spam all the time.
The same benefits claimed could be accomplished with a white-list.
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I get "I'm cute, please come fuck me tonight" spam all the time on there. I know I'm irresistible and all, but... I think the volume is suspicious.
Re:Communication by social networking has advantag (Score:3, Insightful)
I was a teenager rather recently and even I knew this shit.
Re:muggles still use e-mail, mail, phones, etc. (Score:4, Insightful)
-matthew
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I know Y!/MSN can IM each other because I've done it.
2 Accounts. Thank you. Next!
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I never saw any articles predicting "note passing", and lip-reading becoming the protocol de jour.
As soon as my teachers krakd pig latin, I stopped using000c
Re:muggles still use e-mail, mail, phones, etc. (Score:5, Funny)
using000c
?
Data error on transmission: "I stopped using it"
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Now if you kids will excuse grandpa, this ol' fart has got to check his email...
Re:Article is HORSE TURDS. About as bad as DIGG no (Score:5, Funny)
More useful for "kids" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:More useful for "kids" (Score:5, Funny)
Re:More useful for "kids" (Score:5, Funny)
Please parse for errors.
Re:More useful for "kids" (Score:5, Funny)
Re:More useful for "kids" (Score:4, Funny)
Filter by ability, not age. (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words, have their first contact with you be via email. Bonus: You can probably write a script to reject the ones who can't spell "you" before it hits your inbox, though I wouldn't recommend it.
And here's the thing: (Score:3, Interesting)
IM supplanted the phone because not everyone had cell phones at the time, and calling the person up would interrupt the rest of the family unless they had a private line. More than likely they were tying up the one phone line for the int
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IM'ing doesn't really have a way to replace email until it can do all this functionality its lacking. At that point, it's just email anyway.
What's really quite compelling is google's implementation o
Re:More useful for "kids" (Score:5, Insightful)
What, CEO of their mom's basement? A "social network" is next to useless for building professional contacts if it's just full of other dumbass teenagers texting OMG WTF BBQ at each other all day.
Not if today's kids are like I was. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know about you guys but when ten years ago when I was fourteen, e-mail was dead too. Initially, I used to use Web based IM clients to talk to my friends quickly followed by ICQ and and even later MSN.
I only started using e-mail when my group of friends started working full time. I think the reason for this is that e-mail is mostly open at work because it's required for the business. Moreover, employers don't really care if you e-mail your friends from your account, provided you're not taking the piss. In contrast, browsing social networking sites from work can get you sacked.
In short, there's nothing new here. I think the youngsters of today will follow the same path as I did ten years ago; they will adopt e-mail when their circle of friends grow-up and go to work.
Simon
Re:Not if today's kids are like I was. (Score:5, Informative)
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You've never called your significant other that you're going to be late? You've never called up your insurance agent from work? Made an appointment with your doctor?
Most employers don't mind a little bit - but when it takes hours out of your day, then it becomes an issue. Other than that, the occasional phone call to get an issue sorted out can result in an employee who's not obsessing over it, thus being a happier and more productive worker
Re:Not if today's kids are like I was. (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno... in case of emergency? Maybe if your cell phone is not getting a signal, is misplaced, or is uncharged?
So what difference does it make whether you get a personal call on your cell phone or your desk phone? Either way you're taking/making a personal call on company time. Seems like a pretty arbitrary distinction to me.
What if your cell phone is paid for by your company? Do you just not get any personal calls except for at home? Would you own two different cell phones?
Well, I'm not going to be passing love notes on the corporate email. Besides those types of messages, why not? What do I care?
Dude, if there's a court order to see my corporate email, I'm going to have bigger things to worry about than having some boring personal messages go public.
-matthew
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Every employer is different and it's not your top priority when deciding whether to t
email IS text messaging (Score:5, Insightful)
whatever...
I think many of them (Score:2)
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Fine, so e-mail is dead (Score:3, Funny)
Well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
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Maybe we're old farts who are missing something fundamental, and in 30 years, people will laugh how short sighted we all were...
I doubt it (Score:4, Insightful)
As for communicating on social network sites, this is just people playing around. E-mail has the same function, but is universally compatible. We are not going to go around telling everyone at work they have to sign up for myspace. Sure it may be fun to use when you are talking to friends who also have accounts, but it does not replace the universal access of e-mail.
You have to remember that they aren't talking about any new technology here. IM/text messaging have been around for a long time, and social network sites are doing nothing other than sending e-mails in a closed system.
For a technology to kill off another technology it more or less has to either be a better version or really change the way we live to the point we don't need the old technology. None of this is a better e-mail, hence e-mail is fine.
So what they are saying... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:So what they are saying... (Score:5, Funny)
You forgot the best part (Score:5, Funny)
plz use cvr sheet 4 tps, also need u @ ofc sat TBG
Real Reason Kids Use Text Messaging... (Score:3, Insightful)
Talking on the phone is expensive. Sending messages is cheap. Do you REALLY think that kids prefer sending messages to talking? "Why when I was young" kids were talking hours and hours on the phone. WHY? Because local calls were FREE... If kids had the option to talking or sending messages via a keyboard, they would have talked, not text messaged...
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What is the cheapest? Certainly not sending 120 characters versus the communication time you get for the correpsonding call time.
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Let's say that you send 300 SMS messages. At TeliaSoner I looked at it was 0.69 SEK, which would be a grand total 180 SEK. Now let's say you wanted to talk that time. The price again is about 0.69 SEK, which means for a typical month the teenager has 10 minutes to talk to their friends. No teenager talks 10 minutes. Yet 10 SMS messages is pretty
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Re:Real Reason Kids Use Text Messaging... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Real Reason Kids Use Text Messaging... (Score:4, Interesting)
I have a counter-example. I had a "family" plan with Cingular - oodles of roll-over talk time, free after 7PM etc etc but no allowance for text messages. Before I stopped allowing text messages, my daughter racked up $335 in text messaging in the second month of the plan which was after I told her the text messaging was coming out of her pocket - that's 3,350 text messages that month - over 100 per day - admittedly she paid for incoming as well as outgoing messages. This is the case where talk was free and SMS was expensive.
Go figure...
After that month she toned down on the messages but I still removed that service from the plan altogether after the 5th month or so as it was proving too expensive and I didn't want to spend money on a service that could be easily dealt with using plan old voice !
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Not on my phone. I never go over my allotted minutes, and calls in-network don't even count. But every text message I send costs $0.10 and every one I send is $0.02. It sucks, but c'est la vie. I hate text messaging not only because it's cumbersome and more time-consuming than a quick call (at least as long as I don't have an iPhone :P) but because it actually does cost more in many instances.
Correction Re:Real Reason Kids Use Text Messaging (Score:2)
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email is as dead as (Score:5, Insightful)
television (not dead)
the newspaper (not dead)
the cinema house (very not dead)
etc.
no form of mass communication ever dies, it just moves out of the limelight. and then it's called "dead" by people wishing to make a melodrama out of the evolution of media
One word: (Score:2)
Re:email is as dead as (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus, snail mail will continue to be used for packages and anything else that requires actual shipping of something concrete, not just information. Which means that the infrastructure to mail letters will continue to exist until we have replicators. It is therefore highly probable that people will continue to write letters, even if their number is much reduced from the practice's heyday in the late 19th/early 20th century. It therefore follows that it will never be "dead", at least not by any strict definition of the term.
I think the OP hit the nail right on the head -- these things do not die, they simply leave the limelight. E-mail was at one time hot technology -- it has since become commonplace, and its ubiquity makes it boring to the teenager, who thrives on the new and exciting. The same will likely happen with social networks, which are in actuality just a user-friendly implementation of the web-of-trust or reputation metric that has existed in cryptographic circles for some time now. The technology will eventually become relatively mainstream; it will find its niche and then it too will fade from the limelight.
Relatively few promising or important technologies have become so uncommon that they could reasonably be considered "dead". Among these I count gopher, but its most salient features were absorbed by the world wide web, and so it did not really die so much as evolve. Dial-up BBSs, likewise, are dead in the sense that the ones that exist exist only for the sake of nostalgia -- but again, the internet has largely replaced their functionality, and the problems they were created to solve are better solved by internet anyway. Proprietary pre-internets, like CompuServ, GEnie, and Prodigy are also dead, for the same reason, although they were once very common.
I think Myspace, Facebook, and its predecessors -- many now defunct -- are the social networking equivalent of CompuServ and its ilk. They are centralized, proprietary and incompatible implementations of what essentially amounts to the same basic concept -- a web of trust. While people here on Slashdot often lambaste todays young people for not understanding the importance of privacy, I think the vast majority of them are attracted to services like Facebook precisely because they do value their privacy. People want to share their pictures, want to share their experiences -- but they don't want to do it with everyone on the internet, as we used to with our HTML 3.2 homepages, back when the internet was a safer place.
The web of trust concept provides a perfect system to deal with this problem, as cryptography geeks have been saying for years. Current social networks divide people into friends and non-friends, and they use these distinctions to control what parts of their little chunk of the internet people have access to. It's no surprise to me at all that they prefer this managed approach to the classic "make a web page for everyone to read" approach.
Going forward, I fully expect an open, social networking "protocol" to emerge that allows people to incorporate such distinctions into their own websites without being part of a Facebook or Myspace site. It may be that the open standard takes precedence quickly, as e-mail did, or slowly, as has been the case with IM, but as soon as a technology becomes truly mainstream, interoperability becomes too important and corporate distrust too great to allow any one company to monopolize the field.
As a college instructor... (Score:5, Insightful)
From another perspective, MySpace and Facebook have messaging features which are simply email in a different form (posting to the web site). I am still at a loss to understand why posting a message on a web site (with the exception of group communication) is more beneficial than sending an email.
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Because it's cool, or something like that. What's really cool is that you get to splinter your communication into email, SMS, MySpace, Facebook, Pownce, etc when you could do the same thing with just plain old emai
"Teenage Internet Business Entreprenuers" (Score:5, Funny)
And in a related story, a survey of classically-trained teenaged cellists has determined that young people are listening to less hip-hop and have begun to prefer champagne to beer.
Now, how do I text-message "GET OFF OF MY LAWN" ? Anybody...?
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"Yeah, that's sure to cut you a better than fair sampling of the "youth culture.""
I'm assuming they are also taking into consideration observations of their peers. I wouldn't be surprised if email wasn't that popular with young kids, after all, how many of them even have reliable email addresses (compared to college students and office workers)? If a group of kids are all on the same social networking site and are all active users of it, it would be easier for them to use it to communicate with each ot
Kids say the darnest things... (Score:2)
Re:Kids say the darnest things... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, there's your problem, right there.
This is a cognitive issue. Kids can't/won't string together solid thoughts, aren't entertained by people that do, and aren't rewarded for trying to do so themselves. Of course they can't imagine doing boring, old-people stuff like learning to use tools that are built around a more verbose (and demanding, and useful) form of communication. GOML!
Re:Kids say the darnest things... (Score:5, Funny)
Kids can't/won't string together solid thoughts
It's true! [ytmnd.com]
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Summary: Email is dead... (Score:5, Funny)
P.S. I wish face-to-face speech would die. I hate my coworkers.
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In Korea... (Score:3, Funny)
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As an 18 year old, I notice the reason people SMS (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just kids... (Score:2)
In a related story.. (Score:2)
Relevance (Score:5, Funny)
"E-mail is, like, soooo dead" (Score:3, Funny)
"Email is sooo dead", the kids say... (Score:5, Insightful)
On a more serious note, I have just been sucked into the wonderful/scary world of Facebook, and I must say, wow. I knew people liked to reinvent the wheel all the time, but what's with this new thing of "writing" on each other's "wall" instead of just sending emails? What was wrong with emails in the first place? I mean, I can see the attraction of writing fun things on these "walls", but many go much beyond that and use it to organize meetings, leave their phone numbers, addresses, and whereabouts for the next 3 weeks, for the recipient, but also everyone else to see.
So either this generation does not realize what it's doing (basically posting their contact details while broadcasting their private lives on teh internets), or it doesn't care at all about that thing called privacy.
I haven't even reached 30, and I already feel like I'm getting old
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but what's with this new thing of "writing" on each other's "wall" instead of just sending emails?
More flexible messaging tools. As a fellow "old person" I've never understood why email clients don't provide a simple way of sorting address books and threading conversations with individuals. You're also presented with a message space in a convenient location--looking up someone's profile for their mailing address or current email allows you to send a quick message right there. The profile is self-managed, so you don't have to worry about it being out of date. If the person wants current information
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I knew people liked to reinvent the wheel all the time, but what's with this new thing of "writing" on each other's "wall" instead of just sending emails?
The article ends with the problem of lots of separate communities: "It's a problem for teens--you're like losing out on some of your friends if you choose just one. To have all your buddy lists in one place, that's where this is going." So they are working on finally getting to a point where we've been with email for decades.
Also, it's quite sad that sometimes you hear kids talking like "What's your Hotmail address?", as if electronic communication requires a closed web-based system. I imagine it woul
IM is annoying (Score:5, Interesting)
E-mail, web forums, and other "delayed" forms of communication are so much better for almost everything.
IM is really only a substitute for the phone. And then only when it makes sense, like to save money on long distance or when you need to be quiet.
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I found email to be a liberating innovation as
Archiving discussions? (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, I still have my first mail conversations from the mid 90s. Can't say the same thing for other forms of digital conversation.
Give them time (Score:4, Insightful)
Whatever, just don't do it while driving ... (Score:2)
Trend to centralise concidered bad. (Score:2)
Facebook is totally centralised and will disappear one day and take all the contents with it (as will myspace, twitter etc.)
Stop the press (Score:5, Funny)
Sigh (Score:3, Interesting)
Still, I guess it's fun for moment to imagine a Corporate MySpace system. Even more fun to imagine it as the primary communications method with the email server turned off. I bet somebody would build a client so they could easily send and retrieve their MySpace postings.
Oh, and far as the mail is dying "given the annoyance of spam", gimme a break. Spam will migrate to any sufficiently used open communications medium. Hell, have you seen all the anti-spam tools bloggers have to use these days?
Business versus Friendship (Score:2)
Money (Score:4, Interesting)
Remember that it effectively costs nothing to send an email, but I've yet to see an SMS messaging service with a pricing model I like. That isn't to say I don't use SMS, I just don't like it
With telcos buying up ISPs in droves, it's in their interests to keep kids off email and TXTing each other for as long as possible. As a side-effect, don't expect much progress from your ISP on the spam-battling front.
I think I'll stick with email for now.
I can understand it (Score:4, Interesting)
I can understand it. I grew up doing email, now email is my main communication medium, I am in my 40s, and you know what? I am shifting more and more towards IM myself. Why? Consider the following:
We as humans are not geared to multiprocessing and having a hundred open threads of communication. I want to talk or IM with someone, say what we want to say, then move on to other things with our full attention, without this lingering feeling that there is a zillion things we haven't really taken care of and we are leaving open.
If you are wondering, I might get only about 30/40 emails a day, and I may write only 20 or so, but still it's a chore. Young people communicate more, and I can fully understand why they prefer IM, so more similar to speech, so more natural, so more lightweight. I am going the same direction myself, and let me tell you, it feels liberating. I look forward to the day when all the communication with colleagues and friends is over IM, and email is relegated to that twice-a-week habit that is now for me physical mail.
Because of spam? (Score:5, Informative)
You young whippersnappers!!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
My great grandmother passed down an old photograph book containing postcards she had received (we're talking circa 1900's) to my grandmother who, in turn, passed it to my mother who, in turn, was about to throw it in the garbage when I intercepted it (Being the family geek/tech/now digital archivist)
They were 1 cent postcards containing one or two sentence messages addressed from my grandmother and her sisters to family relations the next state over.
Or so I thought... the messages were your standard high-school girl talk along the lines of "I went out to the after-game dance with so and so last night, looking forward to seeing you this weekend." From the postcards it seemed like they saw each other every week. Not a big deal until you consider that transportation consisted of horse, buggy and train so no family was going to make a weekly journey by train unless they were rich (whoo-hoo!) Until I remembered that my family wasn't (D'oh!)
A little more research and I realized they weren't in different states, they were in neighboring towns (long since absorbed into greater cities), no phones were arount yet so I was looking at the early 20th century equivalent of...
text messaging.
And my great-grandmother, in her nostalgia, had collected all the messages they had received from her sisters and cousins and saved them in this album.
Kind of unfortunate that we won't be able to keep the same for our great grandkids (and thus omg! cnt w8 2cu 2nit @ cncrt! lol! will be lost to the centuries...)
Aren't they kind of. . . totally different? (Score:4, Insightful)
Heck, I still use the paper post system all the time, because electronic mail is useless for physical delivery of packages. Of course.
Text messaging is for people who want real-time, but for whom clarity and deliberate content are not important. I must be old, because I find communications done in IM seem to have a rather light-weight ADD quality about them. --Which is probably appropriate for kids these days. --Keeping in mind, that the kids using computer communications are regular kids who are worried about clothes and popularity contests and who's dating who, etc. Light fluffy stuff. Email was developed by geeks for geeks, and because of its usefulness, was adopted by business, and I expect will remain in use that way for some time to come. (Try keeping 50 clients sorted in real-time!) Maybe when the ADD kids raised and trained in information sorting of that magnitude reach the business world, they will create a different type of work place and style of business management, but I don't see how they'll manage without something as stable as email. Attention to detail, record keeping and being able to take an hour or a few days to think about all the ramifications of a question before responding become important when you enter the business world.
(Although, given some of the communications I've done a back and forth on with various businesses might sometimes suggest otherwise.)
I see IM and today's social networks as having potential for something very useful in the future, but right now they still seem to be in a rather proto-gimik-time-wasting stage of development. When the business world finally adopts them, it will mean that their value has been proven, at which point the next New Hip Thing will be popular with the kids, and only old farts will spend time on Facebook. If we survive long enough as a culture, that is. . .
-FL
In South Korea (Score:3, Funny)
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Fortran 95? Newbie! Get off my lawn! (Score:2)
We used to dream of dynamically sizing arrays. We had to compile up different versions based on dataset sizes, and we liked it.
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As an aside, the infelicity I found most noteworthy in the article summary was that the anonymous reader who wrote it appears not to have considered the possible interpretations of 'camp friends'.