I was recently helping a 14-year-old member of my family and a couple of their friends upload a video they shot to YouTube. They filmed a pretty funny parody of a MTV show and asked me to help them edit the video. As we were creating their YouTube account it came time to enter their email address to which they replied, “I don’t know”.
Now, this wasn’t my technologically challenged grandmother who had battled throughout the 90’s with a VCR that “didn’t work” and has since been battling computers and printers that just don’t seem work for her. No, this was a 14 year old. Who owns a blackberry. Who is constantly sending text messages and instant messaging their friends. They didn’t know their email addresses???? It wasn’t that they couldn’t remember their email password, they couldn’t remember their email address. I was shocked.
In today’s business world we can’t imagine a world before email. I have no idea how anybody ever got a single thing accomplished prior to the internet and email. I know technology is changing so fast, but are we actually moving on from the email?
The way people use the internet is definitely being reinvented and maybe email will eventually go the way of the pager. Everything is becoming faster and more mobile. Software is now becoming a service that you simply subscribe to and log in to rather than download. Information is now stored in “clouds” rather than locally.
I guess it makes sense. Today’s youth is much more ingrained in this technology than we are. They grew up with computers and the internet. Why would they send an email and wait for someone to login and check their email when they can just IM them or send a text message or send out a tweet on twitter?
Email certainly still plays a major role in today’s world and I don’t see it going away completely, but perhaps the speed of communication is evolving so fast that eventually email will be viewed as slow and archaic.
My inbox has simply become a spam receptacle!
I remember telling my kids in the 90’s about email…that I thought it was going to be big. They all thought I was crazy I think…aonther one of Dad’s wierd ideas. Well…I was right…it did get big..too big that now we just get blasted each day with mountains of email spam.
I think the figures now are that 80% of email is spam. What if 80% of the time when our doorbell would ring…we run to the door…no one is there. What if 80% of our calls to our cellphones were hangups? What if 80% of our snail mail was junk…hey maybe that is 80%.
So..what do we do? Why not tax 5 cents to send an email….and the money goes to pay off the $700 billion dollar bailout? Maybe this would slow the spam down.
David Winans
http://www.TexasMLS.com
Dallas Texas Real Estate
its a valid point you make about the speed of communication picking up w/ texting and IM. however, i believe if anything, email is actually on the rise from a few years ago. why? smartphones. go out in public and start taking note of how many blackberry’s, treo’s, and iphones you see. this isnt 2-3 years ago when only business men were carrying these. ever “hockey mom and joe six-pack” (excuse my lame topical humor) is carrying a smart phone. whether or not its primarily for text, mobile video, gps, etc.– email at least for now has the added benefit of being along for the ride.
and think of it this way– when email came along, there were numerous articles commenting on its informality and questioning whether it could replace the physical letter. today i would bet that most people see email as a more formal means of communication, and IM and text is seen as informal.
so it’ll be interesting to see if and for how long email can remain a relevant form of communication, or if it’ll slip into its twilight years where i only receive one each year on my birthday when grandma sends me an e-birthday card.
Good point… email has definitely changed and I agree it’s reserved now for more formal communication and business rather than casual correspondence. I received an email the other day about my upcoming high school reunion (oh no) which closed with the statement:
“…be sure and forward this to anyone who isn’t copied on this email. We are missing a lot of email addresses because we only have myspace and facebook contacts”.
This change is kind of like how CD’s caused us to not know song names and instead just song numbers, and cell phones caused us to not know anyone’s phone numbers.
Another thought… with the smart phones people now get their email instantly and are basically always online. Have you ever been emailing back and forth with someone who is online at the same time and you end up emailing, waiting, replying, waiting.. then finally after a few back-and-forths one person finally asks “do you have IM? This would be a lot easier?”
I whole heartedly agree that eventually email (outside of long from) is dying and will die in the near future… the only reason it hasn’t yet is because corporations haven’t figured out how to store data re: texts, tweets, etc, so it becomes a liability issue. Look at what the issues Palin is going through for using a personal email address for official government business.
man i butchered that comment. one day I’ll learn to re-check the things I write…
My inbox has simply become a spam receptacle!