Wall Street Journal Heralds the Death of Email

Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.

In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold – services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate – in ways we can only begin to imagine.

And, as demonstrated in two dialogue exchanges on the October 9th episode of the CBS television series “Numb3rs,” cell phones as phones may also be on the way out:

In this “Numb3rs” episode FBI agents Colby Granger and David Sinclair discuss Twitter while on a stakeout. Granger wants Sinclair to join Twitter so that Granger can send Sinclair a tweet to join Granger when he is in a bar having a good time.

Sinclair wants to know why Granger can’t just call Sinclair. Granger replies that’s okay if Sinclair wants to remain in the 20th Century.

Then after the two agents fail to catch a suspect, Granger says to Sinclair: “If you were on Twitter, you wouldn’t have to tell Don [their boss] about this in person.”

As the Journal article explains, email was good for when we logged on to check our email messages and then logged off. As Vascellaro says, “Now, we are always connected.” And she adds that the “always-on connection” has given us new ways to communicate that are faster and “more fun” than email.

She is so right. One of the reasons I love Twitter is that I don’t have to open up emails to read what someone has replied or direct messaged me.

Plus, as a former teacher of college copywriting and newswriting courses, I love the brevity forced on people by the 140-character limit on Twitter. Why, after all, must people go on for paragraph after paragraph in an email when they could say everything in a much smaller amount of text?

I for one will not mourn the death of Twitter. In fact, I can’t wait to see all the new communication tools still in beta or only dimly on the horizon.

Written by Phyllis Zimbler Miller
Teach Me to Use Twitter
Los Angeles, CA
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