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

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 4/30/22 14:40, [e-mail] wrote:

> 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.
IMO it's always rude to expect strangers to use Facebook, for any 
purpose whatsoever, because it conveys an expectation that the other 
party should have zero regard for their privacy.

I think most people don't think things through that thoroughly, they 
just gravitate to whatever seems "conventional" within their peer group, 
with slightly different conventions from one peer group to another.   
I've sometimes heard young people say things like "email is how you 
communicate with old people".

> 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).

I sense this shift also, and to some degree it makes sense. But not 
everyone sees it quite the same way.  I find SMS great for communicating 
with someone while traveling or while they're traveling, or trying to 
coordinate some meeting ("I'm running ten minutes late", or "I'm parked 
out front of the building."), occasionally useful for getting an 
appointment on my calendar, and almost horrible for anything else.

(Something I've observed for decades is that each medium has, in 
practice, different implicit meaning.   Back in the 1980s if you sent a 
telex it meant it was really important, even though it was more 
expensive and slower and less usable than email or fax. These days we  
have different choices, but we choose partially on how a particular kind 
of traffic is perceived.   Email is often considered to be low priority 
simply because a lot of people don't read email that often, and also 
because it's so unreliable in practice.)

>
> 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.

A lot of this is due to the user interface more than the medium.   We 
can respond to old SMS messages, but usually our phones don't make it 
easy to keep track of which messages we've seen and which we've 
responded to.   (a lot of email UAs aren't much better, sigh.)

Keith