Email Is Dead to Teens
Zephoria.org today talks about how young people use email and how they have no emotional connection to it, while their passion is IM, Facebook and MySpace. I wholeheartedly but with a sadly have to agree.
I’m part of the generation caught between email and IM where IM feels more natural but most of the folks just a little older than me refuse to use IM so i’m stuck dealing with email. Today’s teens are stuck between IM, MySpace/Facebook, and SMS. There’s another transition going on which is why there’s no clean one place. IM replaced email for quite a few years but now things are in flux again. Still, no matter what, email is not regaining beloved ground.
Email is not gone but it is dead in the sense that it is no longer a site of deep emotional passion. People still have accounts, just like they still have mailboxes. But their place for sociable communication is elsewhere.
Ethan Kaplan, senior director of technology at Warner Bros Records adds that he sees the same trend in mailing lists for Warner Brothers recording artists.
I have quantitative evidence of this just in the mailing list counts on our artist sites. Kids have diffused their attention and as a result of that, have diffused their means of communication to different media depending on need rather than dependent on commonality. What I mean here is their method of communication has been subjugated to their individual need. The attachment for e-mail isn’t there because e-mail only serves a narrow communicative need. SMS, AIM, etc serve others. I think people are forgetting that MySpace bulletins have done more damage to e-mail than either.
I work with 18-20 year old kids all day in college. To them, email is what their professors use to get in touch with them. When they email me about an assignment are a question about their readings, they usually get an answer within five minutes. What I have noticed this year, though, is that it doesn’t matter how fast I answer, because they are not going to check their mail again in the next five hours anyway.
They all have a facebook page, some a MySpace blog, but they all (and I mean ALL) use IM as their primary means of communication. Now I would argue that’s why they don’t get any work done, given that they are interrupted twenty times a minute, but they don’t want to hear that from an old fart like me (29)
That said, though, academics might have to think about the way they communicate with their students. Personally, I am not comfortable with IM. I just don’t care for it. However, if I want to be available for my students, I will have to start using it sooner or later. Maybe I can do IM office hours, but then wouldn’t that be against the spirit of IM?
That said, another issue I have noticed is that our students are not getting more computer literate, but actually less. Their use of this machine with a screen consists of using a browser (the one that is pre-installed (Safari or IE)), basic writing in Word (they are not aware of any alternatives) and AIM. No more, no less. Maybe they can use the software that came with their digital camera, but don’t ask about Picassa.
End of rant – back to work.