Yesterday, Chad Lorenz wrote of the death of email in Slate Magazine; to quote Mark Twain “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” Email has a long way to go before it is dead, and a long way to go before it needs to see a doctor about that cough. I agree that email has lost it’s position as the Great Communication Poster Child. The lustre has worn off, and email has been relegated to the communication toolbox rather than being displayed prominently on the shelf.
The ways we communicate are as varied are the people who communicate. Sometimes we sit down for a long conversation, other times we give a speech, and often it’s shouting a couple of words across the room. Back when email hit the mainstream in the mid-90s (don’t forget - email has been around since 1961), it was seen as the communications wonder-child - “nothing could be faster and easier than e-mail”.
Email quickly showed its shortcomings - synchronous communication being the primary problem. Like letter-writing, email was not suited for conversation. ICQ and instant messaging soon became the favoured method for non-verbal synchronous communication. Over the last few years, we’ve seen the rise of different forms of digital communication, including mobile text messaging, wikis, blogging and microblogging, and messaging via social network profiles. All of these tools work in conjunction with email; they are not replacements.
Where does email fit in? Email is still the tool of choice for long-form, one-to-one asynchronous communication. A letter to family, business communication, contact from a web site - email is still a great tool for that. But planning the office Christmas party? Too much back-and-forth; wikis might be a tool of choice. Sending a link to a group of friends? Microblogging (Twitter) solves that nicely.
Although it may be true that teenagers are abandoning email, it’s not a wholesale rats-abandoning-the-sinking-ship scenario yet. Teenagers are the early adopters for the new technologies that address email’s shortcomings. The style of communication dictates the tool, not the other way around. Many conversations are synchronous back-and-forth chats, to which email is not suited. Teens have adopted new technologies that make this more efficient, accounting for a decline in email use.
Like most email users, I get frustrated with email - I count over 90 emails flying around a company of 10 people regarding the Christmas party. An in-house blog, microblog and wiki could have solved this, and made it much easier to plan this party. And I am perfectly happy with the size of my, well, you get the idea…
Email may go the way of the telex eventually, but it will be a different form of asynchronous long-form one-to-one communication that replaces it. Not Twitter.