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Technology: Is eMail Dead?
The Wall Street Journal has declared that we are approaching the end of the ’email era’. They see Social Networks as the replacement to email communication, and they base their conclusion on data that shows that social networking is growing at a sizzling rate of 31% per year, compared to annual growth of email at 21%.
The WSJ article quotes Alex Bouchannek, curator of the Computer History Museum, as saying “The whole idea of this email service isn’t really quite as significant anymore when you can have many, many different types of messages and files and when you have this all on the same type of networks.”
The new generation of communication is more informal and more frequent, and more “throwaway”. Rather than spending the time to craft a well-written email to summarize an event after the fact, communications have become something which unfolds real-time.
Despite the rise of these new forms of impromptu communication, and despite the WSJ pronouncement of the end to email, and despite the wish of very many that email would just go away, email lives on and is still entrenched, especially in the world of business. And the new technologies don’t seem to have yet come up with a formula that business is likely to embrace anytime soon as the replacement to email communications.
Clearly businesses are changing their style in their approach to marketing and advertising, and social networking plays into that change in a big way. Companies have found that they can reach out in a much more personal and hip way using new social networking technologies. But when it comes to business-to-business communications, email still rules, and it will be some time before that changes.
