Email is dead… Long live email
Although it can be argued that email has only recently become universally popular, it is already under threat. Social networking sites are now providing a credible, hipper alternative
Although it can be argued that email has only recently become universally popular, it is already under threat. Social networking sites are now providing a credible, hipper alternative
Although it has only become a prevalent means of communication in the last 10 to 15 years, email is already showing its age with younger users turning to social networking alternatives. The New Economy looks at the death and rebirth of email.
Dead-mail
Email is too slow. Usage is certainly falling among American teenagers. It was down by eight percent last year, according to research from ComScore Media Metrix. In search of quicker and more fluid ways to stay in touch with friends, teenagers are using tools such as Instant Messaging, SMS texting and Twitter. They only use email to talk to “old people”, according to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Email is not cool… but social networking is. Teenagers are turning to sites like MySpace (75 percent of US market) and Facebook (13 percent). Why bother with email, when you can broadcast your life to your “friends”.
Email is full of spam. Bill Gates promised to block it, but couldn’t. Some estimates say as much as 80 percent of email traffic in the US is spam. No communication system can survive a “noise–to–signal” ratio of 80–20. The failure to kill spam is killing email.
Live-mail
No doubt those are compelling reasons to give up on email, if you are a thirteen year–old living in Idaho. But teenagers don’t run the world – yet. Here are some reasons why email is alive and well, and looks like staying that way.
Cool wears off. Teenagers might like “cool” technologies like Twitter, but when they grow up the value of cool gets replaced by the value of useful. Email might not be cool, but it will survive because it is useful. The comScore stats on falling teen email usage quoted above grabbed the headlines, but the same research found that e–mailing by users of all ages was up six percent.
Work gets in the way. Social networking might be fun, but employer patience is running out. The recent popularity of sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo in the UK, for example, is costing corporations close to £6.5bn annually in lost productivity, according to a survey by Global Secure Systems. Chief information security officers said in one study that one of their biggest IT concerns for 2008 was how to manage social networking sites at work. Many estimated that between 15 percent and 20 percent of their current bandwidth is taken up with social networking sites. Another study found that 63 percent of businesses were planning to monitor or limit staff access to such sites and 17 percent plan to ban access at work completely over the next six months.
We are not all monkeys. Texting and messaging are great for what anthropologists call social grooming. Monkeys, for example, form social bonds by picking fleas off each other; humans do it with brief hellos, nods in the street, letting others know we are still alive. Thumb–typed 158–character messages are great for that, but less good at communicating anything more meaningful.
