Reading at The Daily Beast that email is being (has been) overtaken by Facebook and Twitter, for its instant-communication factor, this man or woman spoke from the heart.
As one over 40, I’m still trying to get a handle on Facebook & Twitter. Negatives re Facebook: too many relatives have too much time on their hands and clog up my wall; relatives who send personal emails via facebook which requires me to then log on to facebook to respond [not that hard] and who knows who all will see my response.
Seems easier and more personal to send regular email [or snail mail?] when contacting one person direct. I don’t have much to say that I need to broadcast to everyone (except when I’m commenting on articles like this!)
As one friend said, facebook can be a real time suck. [Hear, hear!]
Facebook positive: easy to see what’s going on with friends and family.
Email negative: can’t really think of any, other than you can’t really post a photo album for family to easily see whenever they want. [Huh? I get photos, album or otherwise all the time but have to admit some are not easily accessed.]
The original story is at Wall St. Journal.
MM comments:
Facebook and Twitter: don’t we already waste enough time going through 40 emails a day of cute dog pictures and chain letters? Now we have to get on the computer and tweat about every little thing we do, and put our entire lives on the net for all the world to see on Facebook? Riciduluous waste of time.
I wonder how the younger generation was conned into believing this is a good thing. Perhaps behind the groovy facade sits the real owner of all these sites: the government! What a great way for big brother to know everything we do, think, believe in, who we know, where we go, etc.
Blithe Spirit 
I heartily agree with the two previous comments. I attended a genealogy program where a young man tried to tell the older audience about the value of facebook and Tweeting. The sample pages of his facebook and tweets were perfect examples of useless information sent to him by perfect strangers. He had the opposite effect on the group than he hoped. I came away more convinced than ever that it is a childish waste of time for most people — business use and celebrity promotion being the exceptions.
E-mail is convenient and lends itself to careful composition of one’s thoughts and is not limited to 140 characters.
Regarding texting: my husband made a wise observation that if texting had been invented first and then live phone conversations followed, texting would have been dropped immediately for the awesome power of real time person-to-person conversation. Instead, the younger generation has been conned into going backward to a type of Morse Code communication! They do like it because of its secretive quality; parents don’t know that you are conversing.
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