Email Is on Its Way Out

When I was a kid growing up, I used to get excited when the mailman came down our street. Although I almost never got anything, I did love those letters from pen pals and distant family. Email was the same at first for me even the pyramid schemes and bizarre forwards were a reason to celebrate. We all remember "You've got mail!" Today, snail mail is full of bills and email is full of spam. Today’s reports show that two-thirds of all email is spam. Now Joy comes through IM, SMS or MySpace (Facebook and Live Spaces too), at least for next few years until the next big change, whatever that may be.

Many of you receive your bills and financial statements via email now, I know I do. Does this mean that you have stopped checking snail mail? No. With that said, what kind of emotional attachment do you have towards your mailbox? You probably love when your Netflix disks arrive or when you get that book from Amazon, but is snail mail all that exciting now? If you did not check your snail mail for a day or two, like when you go on vacation, would you be emotionally distraught? Most of you probably start to twitch when you can't get to your email every few hours using either your laptop, Blackberry or some other mobile device. Why? Because we feel that there are more important and interesting communications there that are timely and more important.

Now, let's talk about the next generation. They do have email accounts and more than likely they get homework assignments sent there. Xanga sends them notes that their friends have updated their pages. Attachments (e.g. digital Netflix/Amazon packages) get sent there and companies send spam there. Sifting through all that, they might get a pen pal letter or a friend might have sent them something to read but, by and large, there's not a lot of emotional investment over email.

With that said take away their IM, MySpace, SMS or whatever their primary forms of messaging with their friends is and they will start twitching and moan about how you have ruined their life. And you have because you have taken away their access to their friends, their access to the thing that matters most to them. It's like me taking away your access to blogs, email and your Blackberry and being forced to stay at the office just because you showed up late for work.

I am part of the generation caught between email and IM where IM feels more natural but most of the people