Re: Mail is worse than everything except all the alternatives, was Service outages planned for April 25

["[e-mail]" <[e-mail]>]

Most people understand three distinct modes:

	pull / directory (Facebook page, Twitter feed, Snapchat stream)
	interruptive push (call, SMS, FB messenger, Twitter DM)
	non-intteruptive push

What’s “rude” largely depends on whether what you send “should” use the mode you’ve picked. Blast emails are rude because they should have been pull-based. Phone/SMS is rude for info that doesn’t expect an immediate reply. Facebook is rude whe private info is posted.

There is a cultural/generational shift that provides nuance for call vs SMS/FBM/TDM, i.e., the difference is whether you need interactive immediate engagement (the former) or ASAP but not realtime interactive (the latter). Those who grew up with phones think less of how calls interrupt; those who didn’t, think it’s much more rude (generally).

However, the only method we currently have (or that has survived) for “post for later response” *is* email. That’s partly why business uses it (both internally and to engage customers); they’ve backed off of SMS for “hot deals” because it’s unnecessarily interruptive.

Joe
—
Dr. Joe Touch, temporal epistemologist
www.strayalpha.com

> On Apr 30, 2022, at 10:08 AM, Keith Moore <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> On 4/30/22 12:24, [e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>>> Email is still around, and is still used for business.   But for most interpersonal communications, email has become the medium of last resort, after social media sites and SMS.  And in addition to the other reasons that cause people to prefer other media, spam filters have made cross-domain email notoriously unreliable.
>> Social media is more for updated info to everyone than messaging to individuals.  They don’t support messages to a subset, except through SMS or their own variant.
> At least FB and LI (which is as much of social media as I've tried) provide "messaging to individuals" (or maybe only to one individual at a time).   But whenever I meet someone new in "real life" and we want to exchange contact information, the first thing the other person inevitably says is "find me on Facebook".   
> 
>> SMS, Facebook messages, Twitter DMs, and other messaging is considered immediate and intrusive, just shy of a phone call in terms of “pay attention now”. They’re also often more limited in terms of what can be sent (total length, attachment size, etc.), vs. email.
> Agree about the limitations.  As to whether the message is considered immediate and intrusive, I suspect that depends on whether the recipient prefers what I call an interrupt-driven (or maybe distraction-driven) lifestyle.   But lots of people seem to expect that whatever message they send, via whatever channel, will be seen immediately.   
> 
> 
>> If you want to send a message that isn’t urgent to a directed group of people, what can you use besides email?
> Maybe not much.  But I've actually heard people say that it's rude to send an email to multiple people, who will then probably receive endless replies to all.
> 
> Keith
> 
> 
>