E-mail Is for Old People

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Opinion

E-mail Is for Old People

11/8/2006

By Terry Calhoun

E-mail is not hacking it for me. I don’t know about you, but I am in touch with more people and information streams, and less able to manage my various communications, than ever before.

Things should be easier. I have eased my way out of a number of volunteer positions in various professional and other groups, which has reduced the scope of the various projects and issues that I need to monitor.

But I feel less and less competent in my communications. This is at least partially due to e-mail. My inbox gets at least a quick look at more than 3,000 incoming messages a day. (One very bad side effect of having a substantial online presence.) After the spam filters are done, I still have an immense number of “subject lines” and “from addresses” to scan many times a day. Unfortunately, important messages are often several “screens” down in my inbox before I have a chance to see them.

I find myself more and more saying, in a reply, or on a conference call, or during a face-to-face-meeting: “Gee, I’m sorry. I just never saw that message.” This d'esn’t mix well with my lifetime dread and avoidance of voicemail. What’s left? Instant messaging, snail mail, face-to-face, and real-time telephone?

Snail mail is too slow, face-to-face is too rare, and it seems to be getting harder every single month to arrange teleconferences with all of the right people on hand at the same time. Even though the SCUP staff makes vigorous use of instant messaging, there are still many friends and acquaintances that refuse to be available in such a direct way. Maybe my friends and professional colleagues are too old?

A recent news article, making its way from source to source, emphasizes the relative unimportance many young people feel for e-mail: “According to the study, less than one-fifth of the 13-17-year-olds surveyed profess to using e-mail to communicate with friends, compared to 40 percent of adults aged 25-54.” (That link is to Fox News. It’s my post-election gesture of collaboration.)

I found that article especially interesting, because my two youngest children (18 and 21) do have e-mail addresses, but they use them so infrequently that I cannot recall the last time that either of them e-mailed me. To be truthful about it, I cannot even remember what their e-mail addresses are. That’s okay, because they still live at home and we manage to stay in touch. The four of us even had a sit-down dinner together last night. In that sense, the article also rang true to me: “‘One of the most insightful data points was the one about friends, but what we saw about family, it is still a lot of face-to-face communication and phone calls,’ said John Barrett, director of research for Parks Associates.”