Do You Check Your E-Mail Anymore? Apparently Not, If You Are Under 20

Some people actually remember when using e-mail used to be cool. It wasn't that long ago either - a mere 10 years ago. Today, the way things are going, e-mail seems to belong right up there with the radio and vinyl records. So don't you check your e-mail if you are young? How do you keep in touch? You prefer cell phone text messages, and of course the chatting that you get to do on Facebook and not anything else. Come to think of it, even phone calls are beginning a slide that they expect will take it to a position of insignificance one day. Social network sites like Facebook are acknowledging the trend and they are introducing messaging that caters to the immediacy that young people want in their communications now.

Why is it old though to sit down to check your e-mail? Young people hate that you have to go through a whole process - signing in, checking, writing - and worst of all, knowing that the message won't be read for who knows how long. It just seems like a transplant to computers from snail mail. With cell phone texting, everyone's always walking about with their phones in their hands, and messages are instantly read with no signing in needed, and usually, you get a reply in seconds - young people, their fingers flying over the keyboard, have a reply out in no time. Facebook is taking a page from cell phone texting in the way it designs its own messaging service. They don't want their messaging service to look anything like e-mail anymore. They've taken away the "cc" function, and you can't write a subject to your message any more. They found that no one use these things anyway, and that they just make everything look cluttered and old. You don't even need to press a Send button - press Enter, and off your message goes. It helps everything feel instant.

What's wrong with e-mail now is that there are a bunch of formalities to get around before you an actually read or send anything. Are e-mail websites like Hotmail, and Yahoo not getting any new users? According to market research companies, they've been in steady decline for over a year now - except Gmail. People still want to use the computer for their communicating. They just hate e-mail.

To some people who associate more readily with communication that's more correct, proper and satisfying, all of this is understandably distressing. Using cell phone text messaging forces you to contract everything until it's almost unrecognizable. Language, they feel, suffers through this. If you are young today, you don't want to visit your e-mail account to check your e-mail. If you'll be persuaded to visit, it might be for something else entirely - like using instant messaging, or the phone function a-la GMail. Things are progressing so quickly now, that even young people in their late 20s are beginning to feel out of touch. The way children text each other these days, the text message word contractions used five years ago seem positively long.



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