I came across a post over at ClappingTrees this morning that pointed out the rise in content creation among young people on the web, as well as an increase in their use of social networking tools.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project survey (in .pdf) found that 93% of teens use the internet, and that teens tend to post and view more videos and pictures than adults (interestingly, they also tend to limit access to their photos and videos more than adults).

Email, in the eyes of teens, has dropped to the bottom of the list in terms of the preferred way to contact friends. Take a look at the technologies they prefer to use in order of most preferred to least preferred:

1. Landline (those teens with cell phones would prefer to use their cellular phone, but it’s either not available to all teens, or prohibitively expensive);

2. Cellular phone;

3. Face to face;

4. Instant messaging;

5. Text message;

6. Social network;

7. Email.

So while email is the information currency of choice in the workplace, teens communicate much differently than the average cubicle drone. But does this mean that everything’s going to change in the workplace once these teens are old enough to become office employees? Not likely — chances are, they’ll have to conform to the workplace, not the other way around.

What this could mean however, is a slower erosion of the importance of email as other technologies mature. Remember chat rooms? In 2000, 55% of teens visited chat rooms, and in 2006, that number dropped to 18%. Kind of a simliar pattern to email, isn’t it?

Chat rooms were one of the first web technologies that provided users with the ability to have fragmented conversations, rather than sending the ‘letter’ that was an email. And in the office world, email is still basically that: an electronic version of the antiquated inter-office memo.

Interestingly however, the email/memo metaphor has hung on in the office — yet even email is changing from the inside out. Mobile email (largely through the limitations of mobile devices, combined with people wanting to avoid typing out a ‘memo’ on the go) have led to increasingly fragmented email communications.

This preference for fragmented, conversational communication and an abandonment of the cohensive, structured communications that existed before mark a significant change in workplace interaction. But does that mean that the death of email is imminent? What do you think?