It’s a bold prediction but changing communication habits among young people mean that email could be significantly less important to us in 10 years time. That’s the prediction – publicised today – based on trends found in our Digital Anthropology Report.
Looking at Britain’s internet habits, we found that there are over 2 million “First Lifers” – those in their late teens or early 20s who are tech savvy but don’t like being stuck at a desk.
For these First Lifers, email is going out of style – and fast. Barely half of them (51%) regularly use email anymore, with many young people instead opting for shorter communications like Twitter and Facebook updates to keep in the loop, supplemented by text messages or instant messaging when they’re out and about. They prefer these technologies as they enable them to contact whole groups of friends rather than individuals one at a time.
Our research found that older generations are now noticeably more likely to use email than any other group. About 98% of people aged 65+ and 96% of 45-64 year-olds regularly use email, compared to 87% of 25-34 year-olds and 86% of 15-24 year-olds. It seems that email is turning into “grey mail” (a term that can be misleading as I’ve been sporting a bit of ‘salt and pepper’ since my early twenties!)
Email has been the dominant mode of communication over the internet for the past 20 years, but that doesn’t mean it always will be. Increasingly people want to send quick, short messages reaching many people in one go, and there are now better ways of doing that than via email.
Twitter has come out of nowhere in the past couple of years and now dominates how for a significant percentage of our customers communicate online. New, emerging technologies like Google Wave also threaten to “kill” email.
So while people will always use the net to stay in touch, how they do it is changing rapidly.
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