E-mail was born in 1971 and celebrated it’s 40th birthday this past year. Who would have thought that in 40 years there would be 2.9 billion e-mail accounts and that 72% of the U.S. population with e-mail would be checking it at least 6 times a day.
Somehow, I managed to miss e-mail’s birthday, so, in writing this blog I did a little research and discovered that there are people out their forecasting the quick demise of this 40 year old. They are predicting e-mail will join the fax in terms of going from widely used to rarely used. That’s where I discovered the title of this post, “E-Mail Is For Old People.” It was a comment about an article that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education. How can this be when 294 billion e-mails are sent every day. In 2009, the Radicati Group reported that 83% of all e-mails were spam. Today’s experts say 90% of e-mails received are a waste of time. Even so, that’s a lot of communication being circulated in the form of e-mails(Radicati Group Inc., Press Release: “Email Statistics 2009-2013).
If e-mail is becoming a dinosaur technology, what is taking it’s place? Twitter states there are one billion tweets a week and they average 460,000 new accounts per day (Twitter.com). Facebook has 845 million users and average 483 million users on a daily basis (facebook.com). The fastest communication growth is occurring in social media. Since you can do the same thing with Twitter that you can with e-mail, like communicate with large groups, send attachments and ensure that the pertinent information gets read. Why wouldn’t you chose this form of communication over e-mail.
So, while some of us are still scrolling thru e-mails trying to find the ones that matter, the younger versions of us are texting, tweeting and facebooking and anointing their mobile device as their significant other.
Check out our new article on this topic in our Library Resource Room and tell us what you think on, you guessed it, facebook or our website forum.
Dee Jones
Employee Help Source
Global Forum Moderator
