On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 12:37:42PM -0400, Robert J. Hansen wrote: > On 5/26/2013 11:12 AM, Hauke Laging wrote: > > E-Mail will still be there in ten years. > > In related news, you can still buy buggy whips: > > http://www.amazon.com/Abetta-Buggy-Whip-Black-66/dp/B002HIX7P8 > > Nobody is saying email will go away. I've only said that email is seen > by the upcoming generation as an ancient technology that their parents > use, that the upcoming generation does not use email as a preferred > method of communication, and that this does not make me bullish on the > long-term prospects of email. > > Will it still be around in ten years? Sure. But so will buggy whips.
Hmm. Each upcoming generation declares many things to be ancient practice that their parents use, no longer relevant. A few years later they have found out why their parents use it and are using a lot of it themselves. It might be useful to look at the just-got-here generation to see what *they* use, now that they have so much more official business than they had in school a few years ago. It also might be interesting to break down interpersonal communication by categories and see whether different material is migrating to new media at different rates. Are tired jokes we've all seen a million times moving off of email to Twitter faster than detailed business or technical discussion, for example? Were we doing stuff by email five years ago which really didn't fit the email model very well, which stuff is today escaping to media better designed for it? Are newer channels swelling with content because nobody thought seriously of sharing *that* when email (or a phone call, or a paper letter) was the best available channel? I'm not even sure who would study such things. Anthropologists, I suppose. -- Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer mw...@iupui.edu Machines should not be friendly. Machines should be obedient.
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