Less e-mail, more SMS

Indonesians may think e-mail is "more advanced" than SMS/text messaging. SMS has been widely used since the cellphone boom in the late 1990s, while e-mail tends to be for the rich who can afford a computer.

In the US, it may be the other way around. When I was in LA in 2003-04, SMS was not very popular. I'd send one to my friend and she wouldn't know how to open or reply it.

But that is changing. At least among the young Americans. For them, now, "e-mail is for old people." Students still use e-mail to correspond with professors, but with friends they'd use more SMS, Instant messaging, or social networking sites such as MySpace. A major reason for the first two is that they accomodate more real-time communication.

So just because cellphones are cheaper than computers, it doesn't mean that SMS is "less advanced" than e-mail. In the future,

mobile phones will be the prime means of accessing the web for users in developing countries.

Links are from varnelis.net. Apophenia further explains what she means by "email is dead"

technorati tags: ICT-for-development