To: Parents
From: Your kids
Subject: E-mail.
It’s too slow. Boring. No fun.
What once seemed like a dazzling new communication tool is not just taken for granted by the generation that grew up with it, it’s outright scorned.
World-changing technology? Sigh. Whatever. We’d rather be texting.
According to a new survey, “Teens and Social Media,” conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, e-mail ranks last in teenagers’ preference among seven ways of communicating. Using a landline phone was first, with 39 percent of teens talking on the phone daily with friends. Talking in person was third, and e-mail was dead last, with a mere 14 percent, supplanted by text messaging, instant messaging and such social network sites as Facebook and MySpace.
The key reason seems to be speed. E-mail is just too slow for a generation that wants an instant response to a “poke” on Facebook or a text message.
“We kept hearing in focus groups that e-mail is dreadfully slow,” said Mary Fadden, a senior research specialist on the Pew study.
“I Facebook all the time,” said Patrice Clonts, 22, a senior at Berry College in Rome, Ga., who like many young people uses Facebook as a verb. “People check their Facebook more than they check their e-mail. You can send three or four messages back and forth in the time it takes someone to get an e-mail.”
Although the Pew Internet study focused on teens ages 12 through 17, the findings apply to the whole “Millennial” generation, which includes people from early teens to late 20s.
“The Millennial generation is so huge; they’re bigger than the boomers,” said Nancy Robinson, a vice president of Iconoculture, a consumer-advisory firm that tracks demographic trends. “They’ve grown up carrying their friends and families in the palms of their hands. E-mail is just another tool in their toolbox.”
But to teens especially, e-mail can be associated more with parents and authorities, and not so much with friends and fun.
“If I’m talking to friends at school, it’s on Facebook or texting,” said Claire Brown, a junior at St. Pius X High. She uses her e-mail account to correspond with teachers, to arrange babysitting jobs and to keep up with choir rehearsals.
“Facebook is an easy way to talk to friends,” she says. “Poking (a Facebook messaging function) is really fun. It’s just a fun way to say, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ We get into poke wars, where we just poke each other back and forth for hours.”
Another reason may be that parents and teachers understand and use e-mail all the time, while many are still uncomfortable with texting and social-network sites. And teens instinctively gravitate to what is not part of their parents’ world.
“I text my dad sometimes, but my mom doesn’t really understand how it works,” said Emily Saunders, a sophomore at Atlanta’s Marist School.
She says she averages about 50 text messages every day between the time she gets out of school and bedtime, about six hours. She has a Gmail account through Google,
“but I haven’t used that in a year or so,” she said dismissively. She got the account mainly because an e-mail account was required to register for iTunes.
There can even be a little element of rebellion in teens preferring technology that is not part of their parents’ lives. “There’s not as much of a generation gap today on some things between teens and their parents,” said Iconoculture’s Robinson, “but there’s always going to be a element of ‘This is mine and you can’t possibly understand it.’”
Young communicators also consider Facebook and Myspace more interesting and intense than old-fashioned e-mail.
“E-mail is very two-dimensional, whereas Facebook is like communicating with three dimensions,” said Maria Walker, 25, a project manager with Welch Tarkington Inc., an Atlanta general contracting company.
“My generation has been on the cusp,” Walker continued. “Facebook came out when we were in college. When you post something on your profile, all of your friends can see it, so it’s a very efficient way to communicate.”
“I e-mail for jobs, I e-mail my mom,” summed up college student Clonts. “I Facebook my friends.”
None of this should be construed, however, as signaling the end of e-mail.
Robinson theorizes that texting is so popular right now in part because of all the unlimited texting plans for cell phones. But the future of cell phones is probably the smart phone, like the iPhone, which comes with e-mail built in. As more people get smart phones, e-mail may start to edge up and texting down, even among young people, she says.
And Walker sees more of her friends in their mid-20s becoming young professionals with BlackBerrys as well as iPhones.
“Increasingly people my age are receiving their e-mail on their cell phone,” she said. “Texting and e-mailing are sort of becoming synonymous. You’re not even aware of
which one it is. You just open it up and reply. It’s kind of blurring the lines.”
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