[LINK] "Is Email Obsolete?"

[rfmcdonald]

Savage Minds' Matt Thompson thinks that it is, at least as a form that retained the fairly rigourous format of the snail-mail letter and remained the central element of online communication.

About sixteen years ago regular people outside a few specialized professions were just getting started on email. Folks thought of the email like it was a letter simply because there was nothing else in our lives to compare it to. It was composed sitting at a desk on a desktop PC. You started all of them with “Dear So-and-so,” and finished it with “Sincerely.”

But this is not how people email anymore. Certainly not young people who comprise the majority of my students. Their emails are composed on their cell phones in a state of distraction. The paper letter is no longer their point of reference. Tweets, status updates, and IM’s are. Informality, empty subject lines and absent greetings don’t even register as an annoyance for me. I do frequently become annoyed by the content of my students’ emails, but I see that as independent of the form of their communique.

Just as frequently I respond to their messages without hailing them in salutation or signing my name. This is the way it is done now. Even with my liberal attitude I have the damnedest time keeping in contact with some students by email. Last week in my Gen Anth class we were talking about the role of Facebook and Twitter in Libya when one woman remarked, “Email is obsolete.” For a lot of my students the bulk of their on-line lives are mediated by social networks and IM. No wonder its hard for me to get in touch with them! Email’s days are numbered.

There are some formal domains where E-mail will remain current, but only selected domains. Structure dissipates if you let it.