On 4/30/22 14:40, touch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
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.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.
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
