*Stowe Boyd has a right to boast about his prescience here, but by now the shoe
should be on the other foot. One should never be skeptical about some digital media format
dying, but rather skeptical about their chances of long-term survival.
*Digital media aren't "media" in the sense that, say, semaphore flags were a medium.
They're skeuomorphic formats imposed on a polymorphic stream of ones and
zeros. Modern young people dislike email because of the ritual activities needed
to deal with it – time-consuming etiquette from an era of analog paper. They
dislike email for many of the same instinctive reasons they dislike newspapers –
it's a clumsy hassle that doesn't get to the point.
*Unfortunately, the workarounds that are replacing email – Facebook, instant messaging –
are obviously much more frail than email. Email still works pretty well in low-bandwidth
conditions, but check out this complaint from Donald Norman about feeling lobotomized
when a smartphone fails at a national border.
http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/i_have_seen_the_future_and_i_am_opposed_18532.asp
*"Nokia will take care of all that for us!" Yeah, pal, but who will take care of Nokia? The health of Apple is as frail as the health of Jobs, and Facebook, for all its genuinely revolutionary power, is just some revolutionary kid named Zuckerberg. Google is organizing all the world's knowledge while remaining a one-trick pony poised on ad revenue, while Microsoft is an aging monopoly whose very name is visibly archaic.
*We've moved from a sluggish analog marsh and into a volcanic zone. Those who lived by disruptive disintermediation are gonna die by it – and faster, because now it's become tradition.
http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/3308900721/teens-hate-email
"Teens Hate Email
"The Comscore 2010 US Digital Year In Review demonstrates one fact very clearly: email is doomed.
"Taking as a given that what the kids and young adults are rejecting today will die off quickly, it’s fairly clear that email is on a steep trajectory and will crash in the next decade.
"I recall being almost ripped to shreds back at a 2005 Supernova event, when I predicted that email would rapidly die off as soon as texting-like social network-based communications were adopted by young people. A lot of the graybeards there (now in the older two segments of the graph) suggested that I was a lunatic, and should never be asked back. Now, just over 5 years later, the handwriting is on the wall...."
