Wired on Friday: The baton of the future in the technology race passes from country to country. There was a time when Japan was where you went to see what would happen next in the world of consumer technology.

For a while, the United States showed everyone else how the Net could pass into daily life. Nowadays, we watch South Korea to see where progress will frogmarch us next.

And for email, the news from the hyper-wired peninsula is not good. If South Korea's teenagers are any indication, the future has given up on electronic mail, and moved on.

A poll conducted by Prof Lee Okhwa of Chungbuk University revealed that more than two-thirds of his students rarely send mail or don't use email at all. That's not because they don't use the Net - internet use is higher in South Korea than the US or Ireland.

The youth of South Korea reject email and use instant messaging, using services such as AOL Instant Messenger or Microsoft Messenger to keep in touch.

Daum Communication, one of the top Web email providers in the country, saw hits on its webmail service fall 20 per cent in the last year, while the messaging across the country continues to show double-figure growth-rates.

The reasons given in the survey of over two thousand second- and third-level students were intriguing: using messaging felt as "if you were playing a game", while communicating via email "makes you feel as if you are doing homework". In other words, stuffy old email was for their grandparents.

The trend away from email toward instant messaging (IM) on PCs has been noted before. IM's success with young adults is now a matter of record: over 60 per cent of teenagers in the United States have used it, which closely matches the percentage of internet use over the whole population.

And as always-on broadband internet slowly creeps into the world's homes, this internet form of text-messaging is the one Net technology with an adoption rate close to mobile phones.

Many of the attractions to teenagers are practical: instant messaging accounts are easy to obtain and maintain for young people, unlike email addresses, which either need to be begged from the parental payer of internet bills, or operated from a clumsy webmail interface.

And instant messaging accounts are more portable. Itinerant teenagers can send them from whatever computer they are currently using, and even some mobile phones. And, of course, ubiquitous SMS text-messaging makes IM the more obvious form to use when tapping out notes on a PC. Plus, there's the benefit of far less - for now - spam.

Email may well be getting a taste of the medicine it doled out to the traditional paper post. Many of the Korean students polled preferred the immediacy of IM, and grew frustrated with the slow, ambiguous responses of electronic mail.

If messaging is pushing email out of the future, that would make sense: after all, one of the advantages touted of email when it first appeared was how much faster and responsive it was than traditional "snail mail".

And for those sticks-in-the-mud who berated the loss of the formal letter-writing tone when correspondents switched to email, far worse is in store for you. The polled students also preferred the informality of IM messages, compared to the long arcane sentences and lack of abbreviations like "2 u" and "kthx" of email.

But while South Korea may point the way to the future, not everything that happens there passes to the rest of the world. And not everything that the youth of today adopts will be picked up by the rest of the population.

Perhaps instant messaging is something that will always be more popular with the young.

It was not clear from either surveys in Korea or elsewhere that young people were actively abandoning a lifelong email habit in preference to instant messaging.

For many of them, email simply didn't fulfil much of a function in their busy lives. Instant messaging, with its always-on, rapid response chatter is well-suited to the adolescent lifestyle.

As people grow older, the hands-off nature of email, the comfort of long pauses and the knowledge you are no longer constantly beholden to your friends' immediate needs, makes it more tempting.

And we do, mostly, become more formal as we grow older.

Or, at least, that's what our children appear to think. Perhaps all those furiously texting teenagers will mature into plodding email correspondents - we shouldn't throw away that mail address quite yet. Or perhaps it will be IM that will, in turn, become hopelessly fuddy-duddy.

This week, a service called "IMSmarter" offered a centralised service for archiving, searching, calendaring, and even constructing Web pages from an instant messaging account.

The IMSmarter service offers features that many serious users of instant messaging have craved. But searching and archiving change the casual tone of instant messaging.

As one reviewer noted, a service like this could come in handy for the American investment bankers whose IM messages need to be archived to comply with US stock market regulation.

Will instant messaging grow up with its core audience? And, if it does, what even more casual, more horrifyingly ungrammatical technology will take its place with the children of the future? Like them, I'm too impatient to wait.