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12. May 2008 by Aidan.
When I stared work as an engineer, in the late 1980’s, the high speed information transmission system that we used on a daily basis was the fax machine. If you needed to communicate with someone in another company you called them up to speak to them. But if you needed to send them a drawing of something, or if they needed something in writing from you and it was urgent, then the fax machine provided that speed. After all, the alternative was to post them a letter.
After that we moved on to email. Email came from the Universities (and the military of course) and our first introduction to email usually came in work. I remember a year or two when you needed to call someone to ask whether they had an email address because you wanted to send them something. Often there was one email address in the office that was shared among many people. Now, of course, email is everywhere and most people have more than one email address. We have also moved on from having to ask someone to send you their brochures to finding everything we want on the Internet. While the current crop of young workers learned how to use email long before they joined the workforce, at least the communication system they grew up using (email) was the same system that is used in the workplace.
But this situation is changing. There is a generation of 10~14 year olds at the moment who hate email - they think it’s incredibly slow and too much hard work to use. They believe that IM (instant messaging) on the Internet and SMS (Short Message System or Text Messages) in their mobile phones are how people communicate. Of course, you may need to use email from time to time, as we still use the fax machine from time to time, but not as the primary communication method. So there is some misalignment between the communication systems still being used in the workplace and the communication systems preferred by the upcoming generations or workers.
It will be interesting to see how this generation adapts to the workplace, or how the workplace adapts for them.
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