Email? what, are you like 30?

I remember an episode of The Flintstones where Fred acci­dent­ally becomes a rockstar, “Hi-​​Fye”. Wilma gets jealous and starts a rumour among the cool kids that he’s actually a square. Fred is brought rapidly down to earth. I am Fred Flintstone, it seems.

The cool kids don’t do email any more, according to an Associated Press report [the original  link is now defunct, but the story survives here. I also note that it’s subject is now a senior PR manager]. To an MTV gen­er­a­tion, that whole send and receive thing is far too slow, the story says. Plus, they get email at school and at work, so that’s like… really heavy. When they’re doing their thing, Generation Y appar­ently prefers the ping of the instant messenger.

Chintan Talati, who is 28, often uses instant message with other younger peers at his work.… He prefers IM over e-​​mail. ‘It’s a way to get a quicker answer,’ he says.

It’s the sort of thing that makes my ‘grumpy old man’ side see red. F*** off, Chintan. I’ll answer when I’m good and ready. In about three weeks. Even the reporter can’t use English: “often uses Instant Message”. Doesn’t take a lot of time, does it, do read through your post, eh? It makes me want to imme­di­ately launch into a Luddite diatribe about the death of proper letter-​​writing. And they can’t spell. ‘Kewl cu l8r’? What kind of com­mu­nic­a­tion is that? And then, when they get together all they do is grunt. But that’s because I’m Fred Flintstone. But also because it’s nonsense.

Everybody uses com­mu­nic­a­tion channels that are appro­priate to what they are saying. The dif­fer­ence isn’t neces­sarily on the basis of what age you are. I use instant mes­saging to make social arrange­ments with people I know well. I am willing to bet that young people would not appre­ciate getting their exam results in an IM (Woah, man, you got an F); they would expect a letter or a phone call if they were offered a job, not an SMS (You’re in. See you Mon); there are certain types of com­mu­nic­a­tion that are suited to more casual forms and some that are not (Yr wife dead. l8r).

So to rewrite that story a little more real­ist­ic­ally: “Shock news: Casual com­mu­nic­a­tion tools used for casual communications”.

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Possibly related:

• Email is Broken
• Mobile Email — a bit rubbish