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Email out, IM in?

berkeley

Doug on Paul Saffo ("Paul Saffo: Professionally vapid"):

Now notice this about the quote — his anecdotal evidence — two high school students — don’t support his generalizing thesis that e-mail is out and IM is in.

After reading this, I remembered hearing something recently researchy about kids and IM. There was a recent Pew Internet and American Life study, "Generations Online", that had the following results:

  • 75% of Online Teens (12-17) instant-message compared with an average of 38% of those online between the ages of 40 and 70.
  • Email use is almost constant at around 90% of all online Americans.

So, while email may not be out, IM is certainly in for the younger online Americans.

Outside of the realm of research, the iSchool's own danah posted on "how to kill email" in the context of Goodmail (AOL and Yahoo!'s e-stamp program):

What i want to highlight instead is an aspect i haven't heard discussed in the context of this: email is already dying amongst youth. Right now, most of us in our 20s view postal mail as the site of bills and junk mail; the occasional letter and package is super exciting, but we can almost always predict those (they are usually correlated with birthdays, holidays and the one-click button). For youth, it's the same story with email - you get notices from parents, adults, companies, junk mail, and the occasional attachment that was announced via IM. Add postage stamps to this and email will become even less valuable; your friends won't pay for it so the system will highlight the companies over your friends - yuck. Even those who appreciate sending email will be alienated by turning this into a capitalist enterprise. Yuck. Bye bye email, hello IM and SMS and alternative asynchronous message systems. There's nothing like giving corporations a preferential position in the system to destroy a communications platform.

UPDATE [2006-02-20T13:05:52]: See an update from Doug here: "More on "youth" generalizations". (Although, I was talking about the "Demographics Online" study, not the social networking one.)

Also, see these posts from Judd: "Email Out, IM In?" and "What’s ‘Use’ About?".