* E-mail vs. social networks
An interesting article in Slate magazine a couple of weeks ago entitled “The Death of E-Mail” discusses the impact that social networking, instant messaging, mobile messaging and other technologies are having on teenagers’ use of technology for communicating with one another. The gist of the article is that while e-mail won’t go away, a significant proportion of communications will migrate to social networking and other tools, and that e-mail use will become secondary for many users.
In a way, the article is right – social networking is a more efficient way of communicating with a large number of people. Further, social networking sites like Facebook allow you to view your relationships in a very different way than is possible with e-mail. For example, as I write this on one monitor, I’m looking at my Facebook page on another and viewing content posted by my friends in a way that never would be possible with e-mail. For want of a better analogy, e-mail is like a filing cabinet with the messages stacked vertically that I pull out and look at one-by-one – social networking, on the other hand, is like pulling each message out onto a table and looking at them all at once. While e-mail is more efficient, social networking allows me to see relationships and content juxtaposed in a way that would be very difficult with e-mail.
However, in another way the Slate article is wrong. E-mail is incredibly efficient, if somewhat less so because of the introduction of unwanted garbage in the inbox in the form of spam. E-mail allows the distribution of content with tremendous efficiency, it allows the development of workflows for a wide variety of applications, and it is the most easily understood technology in the workplace.
In short, I believe that the ultimate impact of newer communications technologies on e-mail will simply be a merging of these tools into a broader spectrum of communications options – more unified communications – not a replacement of one technology for another.
I’d like to get your thoughts on all of this – what impact do social networking tools have on your e-mail use and how would you like to communicate at work compared to how you actually communicate today? Please send me an e-mail with your thoughts.
