Could email be obsolete in a decade?

Do you use email?

How often do you send an email these days? Me, I send loads each day. Whether it's emails to work colleagues through the day, or emails to friends during my lunch or when I'm home at work. Yet it's believed that email could be obsolete in a decade.

It's believed that it could be dying out due to younger people switching to texting, instant messaging and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

Experts are saying that email is dying out because it's slow, inconvenient and unfashionable. Yet didn't experts say that writing letters would die out? Yeah sure, we don't write that many letters, but surely email replaces the need to write a letter at times?

Study

A study, which was conducted by the University of Kent and commissioned by the broadband provider TalkTalk found that email is only the preferred choice of communication for 51 percent of people in their teens or early 20s.

Email took 20 years to develop into the phenomenon it is now, but could take just half as long to die out again, said report author Professor David Zeitlyn from the University of Kent.

Mark Schmid of TalkTalk said, "Email has been the dominant mode of communication over the internet for the past 20 years, but that doesn't mean it always will be. Increasingly, people want to send quick, short messages reaching many people in one go, and there are now better ways of doing that than via email.

"Based on the trends, e-mail could be on its last legs by the end of the next decade."

It does not mean email is completely abandoned as 86 percent of 15-24 year-olds do send out messages this way, it's just they use other methods more often, they say.

Despite the fact that younger people aren't using email as much, the study found that 98 percent of people aged 65 or over used email regularly, along with 96 percent of those aged 45 to 64, the research found.

GMX study

Yet a study at the end of October by the free email provider GMX states that a third of Britons that receive personal emails during the working day say it offers a relief from the stress of work, PC Advisor states.

The company said 35 percent of UK workers deal with urgent personal emails at work, while over half (54 percent) admitted that keeping their personal inbox up-to-date was a bigger task than looking after work emails.

So could it be argued that those who prefer the likes of Twitter now will almost grow out of it and find themselves preferring email when they are slightly older?

What do you prefer?

Would you rather just send a quick tweet to someone, or would you rather spend the time on an email? Fair enough I use Twitter, but I'd much rather send an email, mainly as I'm someone who probably uses twenty words more than I actually need, but I'd rather have the space to do this.

As you get older, you find yourself separated from friends by cities, or even countries, so you find the need to stay in contact more and at times those are lengthy emails filling in every little detail of your life.

You won't find me abandoning email and I'm only 23, so technically in the demographic that should be 'tweeting' instead. Some may see it as 'old fashioned', but not me.

Related News:

Adapting to change |PLM: a strategic business approach? |Increasing asset performance and reducing risk with asset

Like this article? Get the RSS feed: