By Dr. Philip Baczewski, Director of  Academic Computing and User Services

Is E-mail still relevant?

Everyone has e-mail. Millions, if not billions of e-mail addresses exist on services like Yahoo and GMail. There's one cell phone that's all about making sure you can have your e-mail wherever you go. Moms, dads, kids, grandparents, business people and probably even pets all have their own e-mail addresses. And yet, it somehow feels as if e-mail just doesn't matter as much any more.

Generational boundaries

We may have passed a generational boundary in regard to communication preferences. My mother doesn't use e-mail, preferring telephone conversations instead. Her mother wasn't too comfortable with telephones and like many of her generation, preferred to write letters. I've used e-mail for about 20 years now and it seems like the most natural communication method, but I still have long phone conversations with my parents. My son seems phone-conversation adverse, doesn't yet have an e-mail address, but is quite adept at sending SMS messages on his "telephone."

As discussed recently in this column, new communication methods such as Twitter and Facebook have come to dominate the Internet landscape and the popular imagination. Is it any wonder that previous laments about the depth of e-mail communication seem strangely antique nowadays, even more so than they did 10 years ago. We've long since abandoned depth.

Freed from the shackles of E-mail?

Perhaps Web 2.0  has freed us from e-mail.  For example, I think that e-mail has run its course as a reliable communication medium for reaching university students. In fact, universities don't need to push information to students as much as in the past, because they can pull it from us -- they don't have to wait for their grades via the mail, they can just log in and see them -- they don't have to wait for a bill, they can just log in and pay it. Back in the "real world", we don't need to e-mail our friends about our recent vacation because they can just read about it in our blog posting, or more likely via our Facebook page.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not saying that e-mail is no longer useful, but we can no longer assume that it is as important to others as it may be to us. I rarely receive any personal communication via postal mail (other than from one of my Aunts at Christmas).  I still get bills, notices, and other such official communication, and fliers, advertising, and other such nuisances. Likewise, in my e-mail, I get notifications from online services and advertisements and spam, although spam filtering technology has greatly improved these days. In other words, as postal mail has waned, e-mail has picked up the slack.  But, where does that leave e-mail in about 10 years? Only a flock of tweets will tell.

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