It's interesting that you say this. At the IM panel that I ran at the ILTA Conference, general consensus was that email is going to become pretty much useless.
And that it already is so for kids these days. It's all instant communication, most of which has presence technology somewhat built in.
How many of a kid's communications require persistence? Almost none. It's all about figuring out what you're going to do after school today, which is the kind of interaction that is well-matched to IM.
Whereas an adult needs to communicate things like telling the boss what the status of the Birnbender project requests are, and that's something that needs to be referenceable and maybe even archivable, which is something that email is good for.
It's all about finding the right medium for the message.
And hey, aren't we all using blog comments for general long-distance social interaction right now much more than we do email or IMs? Right tool for the job...
I still read all of my email, but I'm starting to find that if I don't reply immediately, I should just delete it because I will never, ever get back to it. Except that I don't delete it, so I have 1200 messages in my inbox since the last time I did an almighty purge. I do like the freedom of non-temporal response that email provides compared to IM, but it often means I just never respond. Eit.
More like the present. I gave up on false positives in my spam filter. Then I gave up on my Mom's email forwards. (Oh. look see what's on Cute Overload today!) So it goes.
I don't know what is wrong with email programs. My user experience is not all-that-it-could-be. I get a program that can't filter, hate it because of what it doesn't do, and then I go back to a program that does filter, but then I still mostly use the main inbox and I don't even utilize the fact that all of my messages are neatly sorted. What I wonder about is when people reply to emails in the form of more instant communication like an IM or an SMS, or something they know is delivered to your email inbox, like a lj comment or a fb wall message (both of those two examples are also viewable my other people as well, which is also interesting). I can't decide if it's an annoying practice or not. I bet there are all kinds of etiquette and a system of values and such developing around this. Also, I wonder which is more efficient in a workplace, email or instand messaging, and if it differs among age groups or computer skill levels.
Position: Techonologist, VisionarytuflilbuttercupSeptember 6 2006, 19:27:47 UTC
I just occurred to me that Yakov Smirnoff would make a great futurist.
In the present, you read email. In the future, email reads you!
This can cover such a range of topics, like affective computing, presence, adaptive interfaces, and robot sex. Did you see Kurzweil on The Daily Show "Future Shock" piece? It was pretty spectacular.
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And that it already is so for kids these days. It's all instant communication, most of which has presence technology somewhat built in.
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How many of a kid's communications require persistence? Almost none. It's all about figuring out what you're going to do after school today, which is the kind of interaction that is well-matched to IM.
Whereas an adult needs to communicate things like telling the boss what the status of the Birnbender project requests are, and that's something that needs to be referenceable and maybe even archivable, which is something that email is good for.
It's all about finding the right medium for the message.
And hey, aren't we all using blog comments for general long-distance social interaction right now much more than we do email or IMs? Right tool for the job...
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
In the present, you read email. In the future, email reads you!
This can cover such a range of topics, like affective computing, presence, adaptive interfaces, and robot sex.
Did you see Kurzweil on The Daily Show "Future Shock" piece? It was pretty spectacular.
Reply
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