Funny story.
A lot of social media pundits have tried to make some headlines by predicting the demise of email at the hands of texting, Twitter, and other social media networks. (So said Dan Applequist in November 2008, Shakespeare the Engineer said it in July 2008).
Turns out they got it backward.
According to a recent study by the Nielsen company (yeah, the TV people), social media junkies are actually using email more, not less.
They wanted to test the hypothesis that heavy social media users had cut back on their email usage, but it turns out that hypothesis was incorrect.
Now, when I was in graduate school, they taught us that if your research didn’t fit your hypothesis, you rewrote your hypothesis, rather than redoing your research.
Nielsen didn’t do either. They took it on the chin, and said that the research didn’t back up their hypothesis, and published what they did learn.
The researchers did state that the increased email usage might be because “social media sites like Facebook (that) send messages to your in-box every time someone comments on your posting or something you’ve participated in, and depending on your settings, can send updates on almost every activity.”
So while email may be on the way out, it’s not going to die anytime soon. It’s become too firmly entrenched in the business community, it’s an easy way to transfer large files, and a great way to communicate when it needs to be read later without being missed. And while the Millennials may shudder everytime they think about it, their parents and grandparents are still using email.
So until everyone over 30 is dead, email is going to be here to stay.
