Email

As one of the first widespread uses of the Internet, email has become an important aspect of computer-mediated communication on a global scale. As such, it has received considerable attention from different scholarly disciplines in terms of its popularity as a medium of communication, efficacy as a work tool, and impact on language.

Much of the data on email use in the United States comes from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. As of September 2009, trend data from this project reveals that 89% of American adults use email regularly; in terms of frequency of use, 58% of Americans send or read email daily. Putting these percentages in global context, marketing research by ROI Research indicates that email use varies by geographic region. As of April 2009, there appear to be regional differences in the penetration rates for email use: 87% of North Americans (Canadians and Americans), 74% of those in what ROI defines as “Asian Pacific” countries (China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Japan), and 63% of Europeans (United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Spain) consider email their primary form of online communication. Across these three groups and continents, email far outweighs the use of other Internet communications such as instant messaging, texting, and social networking sites.

By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, email began to lose its dominance as the most popular online activity. According to the 2009 Generations Online study by Sydney Jones and Susannah Fox, varied levels of email use are attributed to generational differences. Generations such as the “young Boomers” (Americans who were at that time 45 to 54 years of age) and “older Boomers” (Americans 55 to 63 years of age) were most likely to favor email over other forms of computer-mediated communication. By contrast, “GenY” or “Millennials” (Americans 18 to 32 years of age) were much more likely to use email in tandem with other forms of computer-mediated communication such as social networking sites, texting, and instant messaging. According to Jones and Fox, as of December 2008, only 74% of teenagers reported using email compared to 89% in 2004.

One reason that some users began to find email less attractive was spam—a menace to which no [Page 474]one is immune. According to ROI, while North Americans may have received more total spam in their email, whether residing in a North American, Asian Pacific, or European country, email users universally stated that spam constituted the largest percentage of all emails received. Indeed, as early as 2003, a report by Deborah Fallows signaled that spam was damaging to email use among Americans, 75% of whom reported that they were unable to stop spam from invading their inboxes. Several years later, in 2008, another PEW Internet and American Life Project study, also by Fallows, confirmed that the trend away from email continued, this time for a different reason: the increasing popularity of information searching. However, this being said, Fallows also stated that email remained the most popular online activity.

While email is used in a variety of personal contexts, the most frequent use of email is at work by what Fallows named “work emailers” in 2002 or what Mary Madden and Sydney Jones called “networked workers” in 2008. According to Madden and Jones, 62% of American adults who were employed at that time used the Internet or email at work. They indicated that, although work emailers acknowledged the benefits of Internet and email as creating more connectivity and flexibility, work emailers also were concerned by the demands and stress added to their lives as a result of being constantly “wired,” or connected online.

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