E-mail has become the new snail mail - Text Messaging on Rise

by on Jul 19, 2006 in corporate & business anthropology, youth, cyberanthropology, internet

E-mail is so last millennium. Young people see it as a good way to reach an elder - a parent, teacher or a boss - or to receive an attached file. But email is increasingly losing favor to instant and text messaging, according to an ap-article:

Much like home postal boxes have become receptacles for junk mail, bills and the occasional greeting card, electronic mailboxes have become cluttered with spam. That makes them a pain to weed through, and the problem is only expected to worsen as some e-mail providers allow online marketers to bypass spam filters for a fee. Beyond that, e-mail has become most associated with school and work.

"It used to be just fun," says Danah Boyd, a doctoral candidate who studies social media at the University of California, Berkeley [and blogger]. "Now it's about parents and authority."

(...)

When immediacy is a factor - as it often is - most young people much prefer the telephone or instant messaging for everything from casual to heart-to-heart conversations, according to research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Boyd says, young people have developped skills for chatting with "a bazillion people at once". They understand how to negotiate the interruptions a lot better than adults.

Anne Kirah, design anthropologist at Microsoft, even thinks young people's brains work differently because they've grown up with IM, making them more adept at it.

Companies really need to respond to the way people work and communicate. The focus, she says, should be the outcome:

"Nine to 5 has been replaced with 'Give me a deadline and I will meet your deadline,'" Kirah says of young people's work habits. "They're saying 'I might work until 2 a.m. that night. But I will do it all on my terms.'"

>> read the whole story in the Washington Post

Ethnographic Study on "Digital Kids"

An interview with Anne Kirah: Lead design anthropologist