From Death of Email to Death of Privacy?
Reihan points me to Fast Company:
"If you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow, you look at what teenagers are doing today," Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told the audience at Nielsen's Consumer 360 conference yesterday. And according to Sandberg, only 11% of teens email daily--clearly, a huge generational drop. Instead, they are increasingly turning to SMS (or Twitter) and social networks for communication.
"E-mail--I can't imagine life without it--is probably going away," she said. But this transition will be good for businesses and brand marketers. Why? Because while it's very difficult to gain access to a consumer's email address, connecting with them via social networks is quite simple.
Set aside the question of whether Facebook heralds the death of privacy. Set aside even the question of whether the teens who apparently have determined our future are having second thoughts about letting party pictures get in the way of a good job. I'm not talking about privacy as the way you keep relationships or behavior secret. I'm talking about privacy as a solitary experience -- the experience of being alone. Email enables access to one's social network. But it isn't itself a social network. The death of email would point ultimately toward the death of mail, of communication that goes from box to box.
I love the internet and I love cocktail parties, so you can guess how I feel about talking on the internet in a cocktail-party-like way. But I like mail, too -- snail and e. And I see no reason why either of these should ever die, because they give us a way to access the company of others while we're still alone with ourselves. In quiet moments like that, we think differently. We feel differently. We remember differently. We should want to preserve even a variety of that private experience on the internet. There's nothing stopping us from doing so. Lest we forget, email, too, is free.
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Comments :
May '10
Re: From Death of Email to Death of Privacy?
There is no way that business will move away from e-mail. It is the core of communications and document exchange.
Individual communications? Beats me. But the whole "follow me on Twitter" bit seems a little bit narcissistic to me.
May '10
Re: From Death of Email to Death of Privacy?
The 89% of teens who don't email daily don't need to email daily. I bet a only a small minority of teens attend a morning teleconference to report their project status to their manager, too. Their use of the internet as a communication device is mainly for social networking purposes. Anyways, would you have expected most teens in the 1950s to send snail mail on a daily basis?
Once they start doing things like applying to college, contacting suppliers and clients, sending out exclusive meeting invitations, and exchanging information with a small team of coworkers, they will have plenty of reasons to use email. That's why I agree with Duane that businesses will continue to use email for daily communication (although businesses are also starting to use instant messaging).
May '10
Re: From Death of Email to Death of Privacy?
After watching the first 3 minutes of her speech, I am appalled by her egregious abuse of statistics: she contrasts the fraction of people in the audience who check their email on a daily basis with the fraction of teenagers who write an email on a daily basis, and concludes that it's a generational drop in the usage of email. She might as well conclude that the automobile is on its way out because today's 13-year-olds just don't drive cars anymore.
Re: From Death of Email to Death of Privacy?
This reminds me, sadly, of my 'favorite' use of statistics -- by people on TV shows who mention polling data. The magic word is "only." With a simple wave of the tongue, any two percentages that add up to 100 can be placed dramatically into context. "51% of Americans favor the taller candidate, but only 49% favor the shorter! Boo, shorter candidate! America hates you!"
Feb '10
Re: From Death of Email to Death of Privacy?
Leaving aside whether email will die or just diminish, Sandberg makes an excellent generational point. Habits (and even ways of thinking) formed in youth tend to last for the rest of one's life. These habits and thought patterns then grow old and die out with an entire generation of people.
Very often we analyze this or that trend and make incorrect generalizations because we lump everyone together. For example, our national savings rate has been declining for decades, but most observers fail to notice the generational aspect of it. They tend to assume that "Americans" are saving less as a whole, when in fact the successively younger generations are saving less, and the older generations who are lifelong savers are gradually dying out.
Similarly, you hear about the death of privacy, as if all Americans have ceased caring. Yes, a growing group of Americans don't care, but there is also a separate group that is increasingly more concerned about privacy. Facebook made this mistake: they assumed that since Twitter (zero privacy) was so popular, everyone on Facebook would follow along with that trend. In fact, many people were on Facebook because it had privacy controls-- because it was not Twitter.