[telecom] Letters, E-Mail, Texts - What's Next?

open original image

Letters, E-Mail, Texts - What's Next?

On Point with Tom Ashbrook April 3, 2013

Letters are dead. E-mail outdated. Text messages so passé. What's going on with how we communicate?

Forever and ever, it was letters and the telephone. That's how most people communicated. That was it. Then came the Internet, and - boom! - the world changed. E-mail rolled in. For a time, old-schoolers felt cool when they used it.

That is so over and done. E-mail's dying. Among the young, only 11 percent use e-mail to communicate with friends. The big successor was texting. Now that's going passé. There was Facebook, but that's musty. Now there's Snapchat, WhatsApp, WeChat, Kakao.

This hour, On Point: the zooming evolution of text communication.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests

David Gerzof, professor of media relations, social media and marketing at Emerson College. Founder and president of BIGfish, an integrated social media, PR, marketing, and social influence firm. (@davidgerzof)

Pete Pachal, tech editor at Mashable.com. (@petepachal)

Alex Hermacinski, 15-year-old freshman at Wellesley High School in Massachusetts. (@herma_crab)