future of communication

This post comes from my old blog, but it inspired the direction of this blog:

During our parents generation the main form of communication was letters and land line phone calls. During our generation we communicated with emails, land lines, and some cell phones. But the current generation has changed their communication drastically! Land lines are a complete thing of the past, everyone can’t live without their cell phones, and social media has taken over. Remember when we used to pass notes during class, now-a-days kids don’t have to worry about coming up with ways to drop paper, they just need to find a way to hide their cell phones in order to text.

While doing some e-mail troubleshooting at work (part of my job) I noticed a strange amount of emails hadn’t gone through. It wasn’t the whole school that was this was a problem with. So i called the IT help desk and asked what the problem could be, because it didn’t seem we were being blocked by the school. This is when I heard something that shocked me! He told me that the reason was the students hadn’t activated their email account, which was shocking because these are freshman and sophomores!

So this got me thinking, is e-mail the next form of communication on it’s way out? Has social media the next new form of communication? Has it started to change the way we communicate with each other? Is e-mail the next letter or land line?

Personally I can see this happening. Of course e-mails at work will stick around, but other than that do people really use e-mail anymore? Is this why students aren’t even bothering activating their school accounts? Can they just check their professor’s facebook status or twitter feed to see if class is canceled? This of course will completely change the way my work communicates with students and they have started to think about it as they prepare with long term goals, but maybe its happening quicker than we think?

What do you think? I’d love to hear opinions on the comment section!