apophenia: what i mean when i say "email is dead"

Concerning enterprise environments, at some point a few years down the road, shifting demographics as Danah Boyd points out in this post, will have an interesting impact on the future of e-mail clients. Once "digital natives" become a large part of the workforce, it's likely that we'll see a tipping point where users will prefer real-time communication front-ends to async front-ends. Yes, e-mail clients will support unified messaging and will morph to provide a real-time communication (RTC) user experience but younger workers may prefer to live in more natively-designed RTC clients (such as Microsoft Office Communicator and IBM Sametime), especially as those clients support both social and work-related capabilities. If so, then Microsoft and IBM will have an interesting challenge since they have a vested interest in preserving the role/value/influence aspects of e-mail clients within their respective install bases yet customers prefer to see them shift investments towards other tools. 

Academics have been noting that young people's social and emotional energies have been moving from email to IM. Consider for example Steven Thorne's 2003 article "Artifacts and Cultures-of-Use in Intercultural Communication." This article shows a cross-language penpal experiment. Those who used email (as assigned) got very little out of the relationship but a segment of participants switched to IM with their penpal, resulting in a much better connection. In examining this, he finds that this is because IM is the primary site of sociable communication for young people. It is where teens prefer to go to socialize.

Source: apophenia: what i mean when i say "email is dead" in reference to teens

Comments

[Sean Burgess]

The important word there is social. As much as we would like it to be, work is not about being a place to develop social relationships. Most of us think it is a better place to be if that can happen, but it is not necessary to accomplish the main goal. The difference between kid's communication environments and a work environment is very similar to what it was when I was a teenager. Back then, we used the phone to do everything and my parents communicated at work using paper memos sent interoffice mail. Although the phone has given way to text messaging and IM and memos are now electronically distributed Word documents, the real time vs asynchronous nature of the communication stays the same. Unless something radical starts changing work environments, workers will continue to need to use asynchronous communication methods like email for sharing information with coworkers.

Sean---