Every year in august since 1998, Beloit College releases what has become known as the Beloit list:
After assessing their new students, the college comes up with a list of facts that show cultural highlights of the new generation.
It was initially created to serve as an indicator to teachers of dated references, and quickly became a catalog of the rapidly changing worldview of each new generation. The Mindset List website can be found here, the Mediasite webcast and its Facebook page receive more than 400,000 hits annually.

Most students entering college for the first time this fall—the Class of 2014—were born in 1992.
For these students, Benny Hill, Sam Kinison, Sam Walton, Bert Parks and Tony Perkins have always been dead.

Fact # 2. Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.

What is interesting this year is the fact that technologies like the email, which still hasn’t had time to reach all of our population especially the older generations, has already been declared antiquated by the newer one.
And it is true: younger people tend to use Facebook, Twitter or SMS as a rapid way to express themselves and tell stories. Some people would make the case that communication needs to be ubiquitous; therefore having a dedicated, standalone email service doesn’t make sense.

Does this mean email is dead? Probably not, but it does show that there are better, quicker, smarter ways of communicating that are also less intrusive or demanding. This is even more interesting as we look at people that have issues with the newness of the technology or different types of impairments.
In other words, grandpa might not want to learn how to send an email with hotmail as all the challenges to get there seem daunting; but he might be happy to send a quick message to his granddaughter to show off his scores at trivia or bingo.

Finally, the Beloit list also tells you that if you want to reach younger people, you might try something else than email!