Some articles spelled the end of email as early as 2004 (in Korea of course, where else). Now Slate comes back on this matter claiming that “email is looking obsolete“.

The main argument behind this reasoning? Stats show that teens are giving up on email in favor of instant messaging and social networks. As these kids will get older, email won’t be in their toolbox so they won’t use it right?

Isn’t there a problem here? Does this separation by age really make sense? It is because you are a teen you don’t use email, or is it because you don’t yet play in the corporate arena? I think it is the latter. Somehow usage is correlated to age (facts are here, teens don’t use email), but this does not mean this whole generation won’t start using email once it gets older and, well, needs a job, needs to climb a corporate ladder, has to sell products to clients.

It is not because the young generation does not use Viagra that Viagra won’t be used in the the future ;) If you listen to ethnographers like Stefana Broadbent, they tell you that email is the “admin channel“. And admin is one of the “pleasures” of stepping in the adult age, something that you don’t have to worry as a kid. As admin catches up with the new generation, it won’t be able to escape email.

If there is a real threat to email it is not SMS, IM and Facebook. It is JotSpot and the other wiki-based collaboration platforms who make the asynchronous and invasive email obsolete.

But good ol electronic mail has very strong allies in a few things like corporate politics (who wasn’t involved in a “cc war” with an escalating number of bosses copied on the messages), ego (how many people “didn’t notice” they hit reply to all instead of reply when making a “brilliant” joke in a chain mail), bosses processing power (I don’t see a CEO with 50 chat sessions open, taking a large number of decisions at the same time) to only name a few.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 12:17 pm and is filed under internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.