Grown ups in wealthy nations are hooked on two means of communication, phone and email. But 3 of my 4 kids rarely call on the phone and mostly avoid email (the other one is a baby and we are still waiting for his first word;). My older kids don´t to talk like we do, nor do they email, instead they meet their friends in such unusual places as the Walls of Facebook, or in the fields of World of Warcraft in Second Life. I am on Facebook as well, and occasionally somebody has written on my “wall”, but I never realized the “wall” could be a twitter like platform as it is for my daughters.  My 17 year old girl says “my friends don´t read their email, they read their Walls on Facebook”. My 14 year old girl agrees. My 13 year old boy says that email is unnecessary, and so is chat. He meets his friends in multiplayer games and talks to them thanks to product such as the one of Rob Seaver of Vivox whose company enables voice in games or virtual worlds as Second Life. Tom says that talking or chatting without a game is boring. That he meets his friends online at games so they can actually “do things”. The “things” comment is paradoxical since “things” use to have mass. Now things are virtual but they are very real to Tom who prefers to hang out with his buddies talking to them in a game.

Follow Martin Varsavsky on Twitter: twitter.com/martinvars

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Killy_from_China on July 19, 2007  · 

I am certainly old… in my 20… but using internet since more than 10 years…. I still use email a lot, chat, and mostly restaurants and pub to chat with my friends 😉

3.0 rating

skynet on July 19, 2007  · 

products like Teamspeak are indeed very popular during a game but just to tell them “watch your 6” 🙂

3.0 rating

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