About a year ago I started making a point of sampling all of the teens I found myself in conversation with — family dinners, speaking at high schools, friends' siblings — and asking about their email usage patterns.
While it's true that they don't use email as a primary communication medium (yet) it seems likely that this is because they also don't have jobs (yet) and that it's currently easier to talk to their friends via Instagram, WhatsApp and Tumblr.
And yet they all have email addresses, because otherwise there's no way to access most of the stuff on the web. You have to sign up, and unless you're talking about a phone-centric app like WhatsApp, there's no practical way to avoid email.
Even if you can login with Facebook Connect, you still need email to use Facebook.
So, can we dispel the myth that "teens don't have email" please?
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As for my referencing a support operation delaying email, I used it as an example because I wanted to demonstrate that it wasn't a half-baked notion based on anecdotal evidence from one guy.
Meanwhile, conversations are most certainly NOT getting shorter. Each message in an exchange might itself be quite short, but the conversation itself really never ends.
Ask yourself what is more distracting: a long email or a series of 80 individual "short, to the point" texts, where each one vibrates your pocket and you have no idea when the next one is coming. You already know the answer. Often times you give up trying to do anything else and just stare at the messaging interface, waiting for the next message/fix to arrive.
Don't get me wrong; I use iMessage constantly and vastly prefer texting to calling people for most trivial things. But I also gave up IRC and ICQ (dating myself) cold turkey because eventually I was forced to acknowledge that it was holding me back in life. It was not more productive; it was incredibly counter-productive.
To throw it in, the first one or two years using it email used to feel like something that has to be replied timely, and after a while it appears that's not viable. IMs feel the same now, it's supposed to be instant, but putting it away for a while and dealing with discussions in batches every hour or two hours becomes an option.
If urgent matters may come through, checking the messages only when two or three come in rapid succession is a good heuristic.
> So, can we dispel the myth that "teens don't have email" please?
Well, of course teens have email, it's just not a primary method of communication for them (as you admit). To them, email is just how they sign up for 'real' (to them, at least) methods of communication.
This may as well be the same as 'teens don't have email'
While it's true that they don't use email as a primary communication medium (yet) it seems likely that this is because they also don't have jobs (yet) and that it's currently easier to talk to their friends via Instagram, WhatsApp and Tumblr.
And yet they all have email addresses, because otherwise there's no way to access most of the stuff on the web. You have to sign up, and unless you're talking about a phone-centric app like WhatsApp, there's no practical way to avoid email.
Even if you can login with Facebook Connect, you still need email to use Facebook.
So, can we dispel the myth that "teens don't have email" please?
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As for my referencing a support operation delaying email, I used it as an example because I wanted to demonstrate that it wasn't a half-baked notion based on anecdotal evidence from one guy.
Meanwhile, conversations are most certainly NOT getting shorter. Each message in an exchange might itself be quite short, but the conversation itself really never ends.
Ask yourself what is more distracting: a long email or a series of 80 individual "short, to the point" texts, where each one vibrates your pocket and you have no idea when the next one is coming. You already know the answer. Often times you give up trying to do anything else and just stare at the messaging interface, waiting for the next message/fix to arrive.
Don't get me wrong; I use iMessage constantly and vastly prefer texting to calling people for most trivial things. But I also gave up IRC and ICQ (dating myself) cold turkey because eventually I was forced to acknowledge that it was holding me back in life. It was not more productive; it was incredibly counter-productive.