I was visiting with a group of Admissions folks and the topic of the email marketing came up.

“These kids don’t read email, I had a parent tell me to text her son to remind him to check this email for updates about his application,” said one of the admissions reps.

Now, this reminded me of a recent anecdote that a good buddy of mine told me about his brother in college. Apparently, if you needed to reach this brother of his, forget about sending him an email, try facebook or SMS.

Two anecdotes don’t make a trend. But, these stories are not isolated. It seems that students of this generation are treating email like snail-mail, which in web-2.0, social media speak is “like, meh”.

Before social media tools like twitter and flickr came into vogue, we had email. And email, for those of us who can remember, was really the original social media technology. It is arguable the first internet application that saw mass-adoption.

Email was fast.

Email was cool.

Email was empowering because it was a personal, internet-speed, communication tool.

We joined email listervs, newsgroups and a myriad different internet communities. And, with each click of the ’send’ button, we buried snail mail under an ever growing pile of afterthoughts–the obligatory junk-and-official-aka-uncool-business-bin for the rest of the stuff that we just had to tolerate.

Now, fast-forward a couple decades. Email seems to be in danger of slipping off the cliff of social relevance. What happened?

Perhaps, “marketing” happened. That is to say, the erosion of email-use outside of a professional setting has to do with the loss of trust and control over the content we get. In the beginning, email was exclusively an interpersonal mode of interaction. But, over time, it has become co-opted by agents from a different social universe.

Email stopped being “safe”–instead it is now a space where we have to filter, put up our guard and actively ignore what we don’t care about.

I don’t believe it is just the ’spammers’ fault. Either as unwitting bystanders or active agents, we have collectively taken the practices and experiences of Marketing 1.0 and jammed it this vulnerable social space to its detriment.

I don’t blame students for thinking about it like I think of the physical mailbox outside my house. Functionally, they feel similar. It’s no wonder they find refuge in places like myspace and facebook. At least, for the moment, these spaces are still about discovering common interests and sharing them and not about being at the wrong end of a marketing campaign.

I hope this isn’t a harbinger of the future of other social-media technologies. We won’t always get it right initially on Twitter or facebook or other social-media spaces but I believe if we are to preserve these spaces as social-spaces first, we have to pay close attention to a different set of social-rules.

Meh! Email is dead, long live email.