Via Huffington Post comes this, “Email is Dead,” at least to teens who use MySpace and Facebook.
I never buy these kinds of pronouncements. While I do like Facebook and all, but I certainly don’t use it as a substitute for email. And frankly, a lot of my students at EMU do not have a Faceebook or a MySpace account, and they have no interest in such a thing. danah boyd got in a bit of a dust-up recently by making some generalizations about Facebook versus MySpace users, but it seems to me the group she left off entirely were the folks who either have gotten off the Facebook/MySpace bandwagon and/or who never got on it in the first place.
I know that my daughter (soon to be 15) and her whole group of friends never use email, they only use myspace messaging. This is fine with me in some ways as my daughter has a private myspace and can only get messages and have people see her myspace page who we approve. I assume that as kids get older and out of the whole myspace thing, they’ll shift back to email.