E-mail is so late nineties early naughties

Interesting story in the Guardian a couple of days ago about e-mail trends in South Korea. It seems that e-mail use has started falling for the first time ever, and quite significantly. Two things intereted me about this article. First, the idea that young people in particular are shunning e-mail for other forms of communication like homepages, IM and texting. But actually, thinking about it, has e-mail ever been that popular with teenagers? The idea that it's hard to find someone in a Korean PC Bang using e-mail doesn't surprise me in the least - everyone's usually glued to Warcraft or whatever the latest game is whenever I've walked into one. Internet cafes in the sense Europeans think of them don't really exist in Korea.

Second, there's this whole thing that South Korea is now seen as the primary trendsetter in the internet world - this is where we look if we want to predict the future of the net elsewhere. Actually, I'm not so sure about this. Is Korea really so far ahead of everywhere else or is there just a diversification in the way the net is being used in different countries? Seems as though blogs haven't taken off there, but then this whole homepage craze has never really happened here as far as I know. And the online gaming thing - somehow I find it hard to imagine professional gamers getting sponsored by big corporations in the UK.