Just came across this headline from an article posted yesterday on e-Marketer...
Social Media Is Not Killing Email
Pretty telling that such an article had to be written in the first place, isn't it? I mean, after all we already knew email was alive and kicking and that Social Media didn't kill it; that email will ALWAYS play a role in online communications.
Here's one of the neat graphs that accompany the article (e-Marketer always has some nice graphs, don't they?)...
You'll see that email is doing just fine among Social Media users and non-users alike.
But, if you think about it, why shouldn't Social Media be blamed for the apparent death of electronic mail?
Nowadays it's blamed for everything from adultery to job loss to the price of tea in China.
Just for the hell of it, I Googled the term "Blame Social Media"...
Care to guess how many results came back?
Nearly 11 million...
On the very first page of results were these choice headlines...
Blame social media for murky, irrelevant writing
In Kansas hotel prostitution crackdown, police blame social networking sites
School fights more violent; some blame social networking
Lonely? Disconnected? Don't blame social media
Man buys the wrong peanut butter, blames social media
Ok, I made that last one up but something tells me that's not so far fetched.
Know the old adage, "guns don't kill people, people kill people?"
It's the exact same principle here, kids.
People have to buy the bullets; people have to load the gun, and people have to pull the trigger. These things don't happen by themselves.
I surely do not want to open a whole gun control Pandora's Box here... I was merely using this as a metaphor.
At the end of the day, it's people who make the difference. In the case of Social Media, it's the words they use, the influence they allow others' words to have on them, the manner in which they use the platforms and machinations that Social Media provides...
When it comes to Social Media, people are the proverbial smoking gun...