Tech habits of the millennial generation

Came across this interesting post for business technology writer Nicholas Carr, which indicates some interesting statistics on the computing habits of college freshman at Amherst college:

Clive Thompson recently pointed to a post in which Amherst College's IT director provided some stats about the school's new freshman class. The students' tech habits are pretty much what you'd expect - everyone's on Facebook, no one has a landline, laptops have almost entirely supplanted desktops, and the Mac's beating the PC.

What I found most striking, though, were the stats on email. About 180,000 emails are received each day at the school (which has around 1,600 students), and 94% of those emails are spam. The storage required for the emails received last year equaled the total storage required for all the emails received in the preceding five years combined. And 95% of email storage now goes to holding email attachments rather than the messages themselves. Email has become everyone's personal data warehouse.

With the management of email systems growing increasingly onerous, it's hardly a surprise that a lot of colleges are choosing to offload those systems to Google and other cloud providers.

As a upper end Gen-X'er, I pretty much follow the same trends as well, with the exception of replacing my PC based laptop with a Mac, as I find the Mac's powerbook an elegant laptop, but overpriced and am too lazy and un-interested now in trying to figure out how to keep my Windows based files compatible with a Mac. There was once a time I found such pursuites interesting, but no longer.

Without exception, I agree with the explosion of email and the use of it as a personal data warehousing tool. This is especially the case in corporate America where memo, documents, files, images, etc. are stored on people's email readers and most if not all corporate workers spend an inordinate amount of time organizing and categorizing emails to keep as a reference database.

It's become the virtual file folder, but one which grows expoentially beyond the largest physical file folders one could think about, and I think managing and retreiving what we need from it is mainly wasted energy and time. I use gmail for my personal email, and though I like the searchability of it, I can't say having all the gigabites of storage has made my life any more efficient or effective. Actually it seems the contrary for the most part.