Menachen Wecker’s article “5 Tips for Managing Your Campus E-mail: Students can use a variety of techniques, including filtering, creating folders, and flagging spam” begins:
If you E-mail Paul Jones, you will receive an auto-response explaining why the journalism professor at University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill (UNC) quit using E-mail on June 1, 2011—and why there must be a better way to communicate.
In a phone interview, Jones says he stopped E-mailing because his inbox was clogged by computer-generated spam.
“When I started using E-mail 25 years ago, I sent mail to people, and people sent mail to me,” he says. “Now Amazon sends me mail telling me I just ordered a book. I know I just ordered a book, you idiot, I still have the browser open!”
Some recent research suggests that college students may increasingly share Jones’s view of E-mail as “a complete time sink.” A 2010 Pew Internet report finds that 11 percent of 12-to-17-year-olds exchange daily E-mails with friends, and 54 percent text message daily. A white paper released in early 2011 by the Internet marketing research company, comScore, charts a 59 percent decline in E-mail use by 12-to-17-year-olds in 2010.
But according to the recently released National Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, which surveyed 3,000 students at 1,179 colleges and universities, 39 percent of respondents wish their professors used E-mail more often, and 75 percent send or receive an average of 25 E-mails a day.
In the course of the article, I offer more advice about managing email in college including: Don’t use it, Let others read it instead, and Unsubscribe from every listserv that you can possibly unsubscribe to. Read. Enjoy. Learn. Do.
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