Email's too old-school for the class of 2014

Every summer, Wisconsin's Beloit College comes out with a list describing what the world looks like to incoming freshmen. This year's "Mindset List" shows the new young adults have swum in an ocean of digital and mobile technology all their lives.

13 of the 75 items on the list relate to tech. Start with #1: "Few in the class know how to write in cursive."

I expect this is because of the pervasiveness of computer and thumb keyboards in their lives. I was in the class of 1984; when I was growing up, the only place most kids touched a keyboard was in typing class. We wrote everything by hand until college, when we started using typewriters. But people today write everything with keyboards. Handwriting is a dying art.

"Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail." Speed isn't the whole issue. Brevity and the lack of control over your inbox are also problems with email. You can easily block annoying people on Facebook and Twitter, but any idiot or spammer can send you an email, and there's no easy way to prioritize the important messages from the trivia and junk. Also, email messages are more likely to be long and contain fancy formatting. In general, email is more likely to waste time.

But will the class of 2014 continue with their email-phobia as they age?  Email is still the lingua franca of business, for the same reasons why young people avoid it. It's easier to write a long message in email than in other channels, easier to send attachments, easier to ignore email for a few hours and deal with all of it when you have time. When the class of 2014 has been in the workplace a few years, will they still eschew email? This trend toward young people avoiding email has been going on for years. Is the class of 2004 active on email now?

"They never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone" and "They’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day." These seemingly unrelated points have the same underlying reasons: The Class of 2014 grew up with cell phones. Cell phones tell time.

I stopped wearing a watch myself ten years ago when I realized I was already carrying two other gadgets that told time everywhere I went, my cell phone and PalmPilot.

(However, the last time I went on a job interview, in 2002, I'd read an article just prior, saying employers look at an interview subject's wrist and, if they don't see a wristwatch, they might assume the person is irresponsible. So I borrowed a wristwatch and wore it for the interview.)

Several of the points relate to the changing media landscape:

"Unless they found one in their grandparents’ closet, they have never seen a carousel of Kodachrome slides." Or maybe they saw one on Mad Men?

"Computers have never lacked a CD-ROM disk drive." That's going to change soon. People are more likely to get their movies, music and software from online than on CD-ROM. Most people use their CD-ROM drives once a year or two, when doing a major software upgrade. And computers are getting lighter and smaller, with the emergence of netbooks and tablets, requiring manufacturers to jettison unnecessary electronics. Soon, computers will no longer have internal CD-ROM drives.

"The dominance of television news by the three networks passed while they were still in their cribs." Beloit is wrong about this one, CNN took dominance of the news landscape during the first Gulf War, which happened while the class of 2014's parents were still dating. And now CNN has faded in importance as well, superseded by the Internet.

"Having hundreds of cable channels but nothing to watch has always been routine." The Bruce Springsteen song 57 Channels (and Nothin' On) came out the year these young people were born.

When the song came out, I thought, "57 channels! Wow! Who has that many?" Now, it's "Who has that few?"

And still there's nothin' on.

"The first computer they probably touched was an Apple II; it is now in a museum." This one is just plain wrong. The Apple II came out in 1977, it was in museums when these young people were born.

"They first met Michelangelo when he was just a computer virus." Wrong. Michelangelo was widespread the year these kids were born, it had long been forgotten, superseded by the next security panic, and the one after that, and the one after that, by the time these young people were old enough to be conscious of viruses.

Two more predictions relate to the increasing internationalization of the United States, driven by the Internet and technology: "'Go West, Young College Grad' has always implied 'and don’t stop until you get to Asia…and learn Chinese along the way.'" and "A quarter of the class has at least one immigrant parent, and the immigration debate is not a big priority…unless it involves 'real' aliens from another planet."

Throughout most of our lives, America has been primarily self-centered and facing Europe. Now, we're meeting many nations of the world as peers. That's a huge change -- but it's not the biggest one the class of 2014 is seeing.

For the past several centuries, Europe, later joined by America, has had a monopoly on civilization, but now Asian nations are taking their place on the main stage -- or, more accurately, re-taking that place, because the last few centuries have been anomalous in human history. The re-emergence of Asia is an exciting development, it's going to make the whole world, America included, a better place to live. And it'll make the class of 2014's lives interesting.

Mitch Wagner is a freelance technology journalist and social media strategist.