Karen Hultz, one of the teen librarians, sent this to our list. Email is dead, long live text(ing) ROFLOL 
Is this where we need to go to capture younger crowds? Should the libraries begin to carry cell phones and start texting reference questions? I definitely think we need to take advantage of IM… and maybe we’ll have to teach a class on IM speak. Everyone will have to read TTFN by Lauren Myracle. I mean email is for the old fogeys and grandmas. Do we want to be grandmas? ;^)
Cathy K.
The new snail mail: E-mail losing ground
From: CapeCod Times
By DAVID SCHARFENBERG
STAFF WRITER
April 23, 2007 6:00 AM
FALMOUTH — She texts all day. Sends instant messages all night. And e-mails, well, next to never.
“It’s just slow,” said Cara Shiraka, 17, of Falmouth. “It’s not even worth it, really.”
All of a sudden, e-mail — that icon of the Internet Age — is, like, so over. By last spring, teen usage of Web-based e-mail had dropped 8 percent from the previous year, according to comScore Media Matrix.
The Internet dinosaur has made a modest recovery since then, returning to 2005 levels. But in the meantime, teens and 20-somethings are fueling much stronger growth in far hipper channels.
American cell phone users sent 93.8 billion text messages in the second half of last year, nearly double the figure from the same period the previous year, according to CTIA, a wireless industry group.
And more than half of all online teens now use social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, according to a study released in January by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
E-mail is by no means dead. Nearly 140 million Americans used Web-based e-mail last month, according to comScore.
But the shift to instant communication means e-mail — once the casual, speedy alternative to parcel post — has become the new “snail mail” among the Lindsey Lohan set: a slow, all-too-formal way to communicate with “old people” and drab, faceless institutions.
“My bank communicates with me through e-mail,” said Colleen Kanaley, 20, a floral assistant at Courtney’s Floral Creations in Falmouth, her brow furrowed. “And I kind of avoid that — ‘You’re at negative $20.’”
E-mail is for ‘old fogeys’
Rob Zallender, trends director for Teenage Research Unlimited, a market research firm outside Chicago, said young people have not been able to forsake e-mail altogether. But that doesn’t mean they like it.
“Everyone sends e-mails because you have to e-mail your instructors, you have to e-mail your grandma, that’s the way the world works,” he said. But, he added, “it’s sort of an old fogey way of communicating.”
Cabell Gathman, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison researching the ways people use the Internet to maintain relationships, said e-mail has not entirely disappeared from teens’ social lives; it has simply taken a different form.
MySpace and Facebook may be known for the photographs and message boards that dominate users’ personal profile pages. But the social networking sites also provide heavily-used private messaging systems that are similar to e-mail.
Still, signs of a significant shift are emerging.
Last week, in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, students spread the grisly news by instant message and posted Internet tributes to slain friends on Facebook,
And in the aftermath, university officials faced criticism for sending students an e-mail more than two hours after the first of two waves of killings, when many were already on campus.
Since then, dozens of colleges and universities have inquired about the sort of text message alert systems already in place on 70 to 80 campuses across the country — zapping emergency messages, sports scores and news of weather-related class cancellations to thousands of cell phone-toting students at a time.
Thomas Plante, a professor of psychology at Santa Clara University in California, said texting and instant messaging can be a boon for those who have trouble communicating in person.
“That could be helpful for someone who is shy or finds it hard to say, ‘I love you’ or ‘please forgive me,’” he said.
But on the continuum of meaningful communication, he said, the new channels are far removed from face-to-face conversation, phone calls and even e-mail, which tends to be a bit more expansive than instant messaging, with shorthand like OMG, for “Oh My God,” and, of course, “2BZ4UQT” or “too busy for you cutey.”
Closing the generation gap
The lingo has remained impenetrable to some parents still trying to sort out their children’s Yahoo and Google e-mail addresses.
But the old folks are catching up. Between February 2006 and February 2007, growth in texting among 55- to 64-year-olds far outstripped that among 13- to 17-year-olds, according to M:Metrics, a Seattle-based mobile market research company.
Seamus McAteer, a senior analyst with the firm, said the surge is explained in part by parents trying to communicate with their children on their own terms.
Some teens, like Shikara, are not thrilled with the trend. “My mom just figured out how to text and it was weird,” she said.
But Kristina Watts, 18, of Falmouth, said she has been happy to welcome her mother, Dina Brennan, 40, into the fold.
“She’ll text just to say ‘hi,” said Watts.
Brennan, a saleswoman, said she has undergone a conversion of sorts two months after getting her first text-capable phone.
“I always thought it was stupid,” she said, as she ate lunch with her daughter in Mashpee on a recent afternoon. “Then, when I started to get texting, it was fun.”
David Scharfenberg can be reached at dscharfenberg@capecodonline.com.
