Will electronic communications splinter into various fragments, as is currently happening with mass media? This very question was addressed in today’s Wall Street Journal.
Are the days of e-mail dominance to be replaced with a plethora of social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr?
While e-mail will surive into the future, it is clear it will no longer be the dominant form of electronic communications.
In fact, the days in which e-mail dominated the way Person A communicated with Person B are already over. While I continue to send and receive e-mails every day, I sift through more tweets, Facebook messages, RSS feeds and blog postings. Heck, you are reading one right now.
E-mail is becoming increasingly obsolete.
Among the reasons:
- Why do you need to ask someone to send you something that has already been posted?
- Why do you have to e-mail 30 people something you could post for the world — or make private just for a finite group of people in a matter of clicks?
- Why do you have to send large attachments through several e-mails when you could just post it all online in a matter of seconds?
- Why do you have to send updates of a project through multiple e-mails when you could simply update a page or communicate in real-time through a chat?
Social networking allows one person to reach the masses in both real-time as well as when the masses want to be reached.
Blogs, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr all allow users to check up on what they missed in their own time and without being bombarded. With e-mail, users have to sift through countless worthless and outdated notes and information around the clock to stay current and still risk missing the information they want. With the more modern social networks, a user could go straight to the information he or she want.
Of course, the splinter of e-communications has its own inherent risks. Chief among those, in my opinion, is the real chance Person A will not be able to reach Person B.
With so many social networks available, it is easy to get lost or not be tuned in to the same ones. If I send out the cure to cancer on my Twitter account, but no one is listening, does it matter? At least with e-mail, you could make fairly sure it reaches the person.
In addition, the amount of energy and time necessary to stay abreast of all the social networks can be overwhelming and one’s productivity could suffer in the process. It takes a lot of time and energy to stay current in all the social networks available. To be blunt, it’s a huge investment.
While I do not intend on abandoning e-mail anytime soon, I recognize the need to stay relevant, up-to-date and branch out. This is why I am an active social networker across platforms — and think you should be, too.
[...] explored this question last night in my technology blogI write for the Hearst Connecticut newspaper group. I think it’s a relevent question for [...]
Comment by Are electronic communications splintering? at delowdown with deloma — October 13th, 2009 @ 2:33 am