delete as appropriate
More than 107 trillion emails are sent every year, but its vice-like on our lives is loosening and this figure is starting to fall. Email, 40 years old last year, and once the domain of the cheeky geek is rapidly falling out of favour with the youth of today. Across all age demographics up to middle-age, email usage is falling by as much as 60% and even Mark Zuckerberg has proclaimed that ‘high school kids’ don’t email. Luckily for him however they use instant messenger and social networking ‘chat’ facilities to do so.
The proliferation of spam has undoubtedly contributed to its demise. If your pc or laptop is not suitably protected you can easily expect 90% of your email traffic to be unrequested rubbish, much of it containing viruses, malicious software or ‘phishing’ messages from fake Nigerian Princes. In October 2009, the self-styled ‘King of Spam’, Sanford Wallace’ was fined a mind-boggling $711m for illegally obtaining and spamming Facebook users and rumour has it we’ll never see the like of him again.
On a corporate level the sheer quantity of even ‘qualified’ email traffic has become unsustainable. Employees, in a ‘communications’ oriented role or ‘office/desk’ job, receive on average over 200 emails a day and spend somewhere between five and 20 hours a week merely attempting to clear their inboxes. The OCD amongst us are definitely at the higher end of this spectrum as nothing rewards quite like an empty box! This ‘qualified’ email has been found comprise mainly a highly dubious mix of round-robins, personal messages, ‘political’ Ccs and managerial directives & memos that clog your archives and do precious little to actually boost productivity. Research has shown that it takes over a minute to regain concentration after the distraction of reading that irrelevant email and with 30 emails popping up every hour, that’s a helluva lot of wasted time. To its detractors, email has had its day.
However, everything’s relative and rumours of it’s demise need to tempered a little. There are still an estimated three billion email accounts in the world, a figure that dwarfs all other form of electronic communication. Facebook has 20% of that number, Twitter only 5%. This is not the end of email, it’s just the end of its communication monopoly.
