habits and changing uses of email
Aug. 4th, 2007 12:50 pmLately, I've been hearing about studies showing that today's teenagers, raised in a world where "Internet" means "web sites", consider e-mail something they only use to talk to adults. They do all their interaction via the messaging systems of whatever sites they prefer to hang out on.
And I just realized why this has happened. Webmail.
Someone like me, who was using computers and the net before Mosaic, has spent time in a world where the only option for e-mail is to run a program on your machine. Plug in some cryptic details and it goes and talks to the email server, gets the mail, and does things to it. Maybe you've got some filters to sort it; I know I do.
But a few years after the WWW came along, some folks got the idea to make a website that acted as an e-mail program. No configuration for the user. Just type 'hotmail.com' in the address bar of your browser, log in, and you can do your mail. Usage stats would be hard to come by, but given a sample of people I know, folks who prefer the extra fiddliness and configurability of a local mail client are a minority. My boyfriends use gmail, my mom uses her ISP's webmail, a lot of my friends have addresses at various web-mail sites rather than their own domain, or their ISP.*
So to someone raised in a world of web-mail, who may not have ever even heard of the idea of a program whose sole purpose is to do e-mail on your own computer... e-mail is just another web-site.
All your friends are on socialsite.com. So are you. Why do you want to visit webmail.com? It's another damn site to put into your habitual trawl, that almost never contains anything but spam, and maybe notifications about messages you already read on the social site. I have abandoned accounts on gallery sites that're too much hassle for the amount of feedback and love I get from them; it's no surprise that countless teens treat email the same way.
Me, I prefer e-mail because of how I use a local client. It checks once an hour and changes its dock icon subtly if I have anything. It's just there, a habit I've taken out of myself and given to the computer. And so I funnel all the website communications through it, if I can. I don't have to think to check thissite.com or thatsite.com; most of my conversations end up right there. If I could funnel more site communications into my e-mail, I would.
* I also have one friend who still does most of her e-mail by telnetting to a remote machine and running a text client, of course. I don't think I have several who do.
And I just realized why this has happened. Webmail.
Someone like me, who was using computers and the net before Mosaic, has spent time in a world where the only option for e-mail is to run a program on your machine. Plug in some cryptic details and it goes and talks to the email server, gets the mail, and does things to it. Maybe you've got some filters to sort it; I know I do.
But a few years after the WWW came along, some folks got the idea to make a website that acted as an e-mail program. No configuration for the user. Just type 'hotmail.com' in the address bar of your browser, log in, and you can do your mail. Usage stats would be hard to come by, but given a sample of people I know, folks who prefer the extra fiddliness and configurability of a local mail client are a minority. My boyfriends use gmail, my mom uses her ISP's webmail, a lot of my friends have addresses at various web-mail sites rather than their own domain, or their ISP.*
So to someone raised in a world of web-mail, who may not have ever even heard of the idea of a program whose sole purpose is to do e-mail on your own computer... e-mail is just another web-site.
All your friends are on socialsite.com. So are you. Why do you want to visit webmail.com? It's another damn site to put into your habitual trawl, that almost never contains anything but spam, and maybe notifications about messages you already read on the social site. I have abandoned accounts on gallery sites that're too much hassle for the amount of feedback and love I get from them; it's no surprise that countless teens treat email the same way.
Me, I prefer e-mail because of how I use a local client. It checks once an hour and changes its dock icon subtly if I have anything. It's just there, a habit I've taken out of myself and given to the computer. And so I funnel all the website communications through it, if I can. I don't have to think to check thissite.com or thatsite.com; most of my conversations end up right there. If I could funnel more site communications into my e-mail, I would.
* I also have one friend who still does most of her e-mail by telnetting to a remote machine and running a text client, of course. I don't think I have several who do.