4 ms·

It's a bit different when friends are spread out all over the globe. If I want to message someone 13 hours away it is either Facebook or email, and facebook has

It's a bit different when friends are spread out all over the globe. If I want to message someone 13 hours away it is either Facebook or email, and facebook has been replacing those short messages that email or IM used to be used for.

TsiCClawOfLight 13y ago
But why? Why can't people use email anymore? This is a genuine question! I rarely feel like I would need something other than email for anything, so I don't understand how facebook replaced that?
- Volpe 13y ago
  Depending on your friends, facebook offers various advantages. You can see what they've been doing", see if they are online, send a simple 'hey' that wouldn't really be written if you were to use email. People do use email still... But pretending facebook doesn't offer any value is an exercise in reality distortion.
- amirmc 13y ago
  FB gives you a great way to stay peripherally involved in people's lives. It allows you to have numerous but low-cost touch points such that when you next have a chance to properly catch-up you already know what the major events have been. It's the complete opposite of email where I think "I'll wait until I have something proper to say" and then never send anything. On FB, it's totally normal to leave one-line comments. Having said this, I barely use FB anymore (due to privacy concerns). Edit: I should also add that I've never used email in the social way that people seem to refer to. I really don't understand how that would be possible. FB allowed new types of social exchanges that didn't exist before (for me, at least).
  - TsiCClawOfLight 13y ago
    I think I start to get it, thank you. So facebook basically replaces blogs/microblogging and photo sharing websites? i.e. blogs for the passive or peripheral involvement. Regarding your second point, mailing lists and group emails combined with personal emails are a good medium of social interaction IMO.
    - rahoulb 13y ago
      It's more like having RSS feeds in your reader for blogs that are rarely updated and you may have forgotten about (although not quite as you have to actively mark feeds as read). An email (whether direct or via a mailing list) is an interruption (at least to me), whereas a Facebook post just drops off the bottom of the page if I ignore it. EDIT: Sorry, that was poorly worded. The discovery side of it is more like an RSS reader (or maybe a group email). But the key distinction (for me at least) is that I can be totally passive - I don't even need to mark things as read - or I can engage.
      - amirmc 13y ago
        Moreoever, it's socially acceptable to be passive whereas ignoring an email (even a group email) is considered more like wilfully ignoring them (e.g cold-shoulder, blanking, etc)
    - jtolle 13y ago
      Isn't there an old saw about every big "Web 2.0" business being something that took what people were already doing but made it "social"? So Facebook made blogging social, Twitter made texting social, etc. 10+ years ago I knew a bunch of people who had personal blogs, but of course most of them were filled with "sorry for the lack of posts recently" type posts. I'm not on Facebook, but I understand why it's popular. The more people who might be reading, the more reason there is to post stuff. So it makes sense that everyone winds up in the same network.
- rahoulb 13y ago
  For me, it's not about the direct messaging - it's the feed. Someone on the other side of the world posts a photo of something they've been doing, I comment on it and we have a conversation. For this to happen without the likes of Facebook, they would have to explicitly share that photo with me, something that may or may not be likely depending upon what the photo is about, what their perception of my interests are and whether they think I want to be bothered with it.
- megablast 13y ago
  They can, but they do not. Why send an email to each person, when you can just post baby pictures or what you are doing to everyone on your feed? Then you don't have to worry about missing someone.
  - fauigerzigerk 13y ago
    You could just as well use an address book group to send email to everyone or to a specific group. But I worry much more about spamming people with stuff they're not interested in than missing someone.
    - freehunter 13y ago
      Sharing on Facebook is a passive thing. You put a picture on your profile and your friends decide if it's worth their time to look at further. You never explicitly told them to look at it, you merely gave them the opportunity. It's like hanging a picture on the wall of your home. Email is a very explicit share. You are telling someone to look at this, because you sent it to them. This is much more personal. There's a social stigma in over-emailing, as much as there is a social stigma in not reading the emails a friend sends you. Emailing pictures is more like calling a friend. Yeah it's nice to hear their voice directly, but what if they don't want to hear what you have to say at this moment?
      - fauigerzigerk 13y ago
        Email has changed. I don't reply to every link or picture people send me, nor do I expect a reply on each and every email I send. There are certainly different social assumptions between email and Facebook, but the differences have long started to blur, depending on what context we're talking about (e.g work vs friends, etc.)
      - TsiCClawOfLight 13y ago
        I agree with fauigerzigerk. I would say that email can, at this point, be used to "bump" stuff, to inform people, etc. without commitment or expectancy of an answer. At least, that's the way I use it.
tripzilch 13y ago
You can't email someone 13 hours away? [0] What difference does it make if they're spread out all over the globe or not, whether you can email or FB them? I do get the idea, sometimes I feel a little bit excluded without an FB account, but I have never had the problem that somebody didn't have an email address. Not even kids. People seem to make up all sorts of excuses, but in the end it always boils down to 1) suffering minor inconveniences and 2) the (often[1] irrational) fear of social exile. As other people have pointed out, changing networks is not that hard. It's a false belief that it is. Years ago my local friends were mostly on MSN[2], East European/Middle East folks were on ICQ and Y!C, US people were using AIM. So I used Trillian and later Pidgin. What you saw was this, people are moving around all the time, and many of the persons were 2 or 3x in my contact list because they too were on multiple networks. Google chat just sort of edged itself in there as well. Think of it like this, remember how easy it was to find all your friends on FB because of that network? And didn't the same happen with email, and with AIM/MSN/iCQ/etc? I see friends and acquaintances trickle in on G+ without any effort for that reason (except I don't want to use G+ either). Now FB pushes its "help" quite aggressively, but even without that, people connect in networks, point eachother to their friends, it's very peer-to-peer :) [0] I mean, it happens ... http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html [1] note I'm not saying "always", I can imagine certain high school scenarios where this fear might be somewhat real, although one has to wonder ... [2] unfortunately I lost my MSN acct because the not-hotmail domain I registered it to expired a long long time ago and it stopped working--if anyone knows a solution to that I'd love to hear it because I would love to see that old contact list back :) (however I could also reg a new account and repopulate my contacts via-via just as easy)
- freehunter 13y ago
  >You can't email someone 13 hours away? >facebook has been replacing those short messages that email or IM used to be used for.
DamnYuppie 13y ago
I don't agree with this. I have had friends spread all over the globe and we still managed to have a call once a week and text regularly. Facebook does nothing to promote or enhance true friendships, it is social lip gloss at best. Yet too many people are to unfilled and shallow to truly see it.
betterunix 13y ago
Not really. My friends are spread out all over the globe. I do not use Facebook. I still manage to email and IM them without any headaches or complaints.
- aw3c2 13y ago
  That's lucky. What IM do you use? Skype? ;)
  - betterunix 13y ago
    It is not "lucky," it is a result of the fact that my friends are actually my friends. For what it's worth, I use jabber.

TsiCClawOfLight 13y ago

But why? Why can't people use email anymore? This is a genuine question! I rarely feel like I would need something other than email for anything, so I don't understand how facebook replaced that?

Volpe 13y ago
Depending on your friends, facebook offers various advantages. You can see what they've been doing", see if they are online, send a simple 'hey' that wouldn't really be written if you were to use email. People do use email still... But pretending facebook doesn't offer any value is an exercise in reality distortion.
amirmc 13y ago
FB gives you a great way to stay peripherally involved in people's lives. It allows you to have numerous but low-cost touch points such that when you next have a chance to properly catch-up you already know what the major events have been. It's the complete opposite of email where I think "I'll wait until I have something proper to say" and then never send anything. On FB, it's totally normal to leave one-line comments. Having said this, I barely use FB anymore (due to privacy concerns). Edit: I should also add that I've never used email in the social way that people seem to refer to. I really don't understand how that would be possible. FB allowed new types of social exchanges that didn't exist before (for me, at least).
- TsiCClawOfLight 13y ago
  I think I start to get it, thank you. So facebook basically replaces blogs/microblogging and photo sharing websites? i.e. blogs for the passive or peripheral involvement. Regarding your second point, mailing lists and group emails combined with personal emails are a good medium of social interaction IMO.
  - rahoulb 13y ago
    It's more like having RSS feeds in your reader for blogs that are rarely updated and you may have forgotten about (although not quite as you have to actively mark feeds as read). An email (whether direct or via a mailing list) is an interruption (at least to me), whereas a Facebook post just drops off the bottom of the page if I ignore it. EDIT: Sorry, that was poorly worded. The discovery side of it is more like an RSS reader (or maybe a group email). But the key distinction (for me at least) is that I can be totally passive - I don't even need to mark things as read - or I can engage.
    - amirmc 13y ago
      Moreoever, it's socially acceptable to be passive whereas ignoring an email (even a group email) is considered more like wilfully ignoring them (e.g cold-shoulder, blanking, etc)
  - jtolle 13y ago
    Isn't there an old saw about every big "Web 2.0" business being something that took what people were already doing but made it "social"? So Facebook made blogging social, Twitter made texting social, etc. 10+ years ago I knew a bunch of people who had personal blogs, but of course most of them were filled with "sorry for the lack of posts recently" type posts. I'm not on Facebook, but I understand why it's popular. The more people who might be reading, the more reason there is to post stuff. So it makes sense that everyone winds up in the same network.
rahoulb 13y ago
For me, it's not about the direct messaging - it's the feed. Someone on the other side of the world posts a photo of something they've been doing, I comment on it and we have a conversation. For this to happen without the likes of Facebook, they would have to explicitly share that photo with me, something that may or may not be likely depending upon what the photo is about, what their perception of my interests are and whether they think I want to be bothered with it.
megablast 13y ago
They can, but they do not. Why send an email to each person, when you can just post baby pictures or what you are doing to everyone on your feed? Then you don't have to worry about missing someone.
- fauigerzigerk 13y ago
  You could just as well use an address book group to send email to everyone or to a specific group. But I worry much more about spamming people with stuff they're not interested in than missing someone.
  - freehunter 13y ago
    Sharing on Facebook is a passive thing. You put a picture on your profile and your friends decide if it's worth their time to look at further. You never explicitly told them to look at it, you merely gave them the opportunity. It's like hanging a picture on the wall of your home. Email is a very explicit share. You are telling someone to look at this, because you sent it to them. This is much more personal. There's a social stigma in over-emailing, as much as there is a social stigma in not reading the emails a friend sends you. Emailing pictures is more like calling a friend. Yeah it's nice to hear their voice directly, but what if they don't want to hear what you have to say at this moment?
    - fauigerzigerk 13y ago
      Email has changed. I don't reply to every link or picture people send me, nor do I expect a reply on each and every email I send. There are certainly different social assumptions between email and Facebook, but the differences have long started to blur, depending on what context we're talking about (e.g work vs friends, etc.)
    - TsiCClawOfLight 13y ago
      I agree with fauigerzigerk. I would say that email can, at this point, be used to "bump" stuff, to inform people, etc. without commitment or expectancy of an answer. At least, that's the way I use it.

tripzilch 13y ago

You can't email someone 13 hours away? [0] What difference does it make if they're spread out all over the globe or not, whether you can email or FB them? I do get the idea, sometimes I feel a little bit excluded without an FB account, but I have never had the problem that somebody didn't have an email address. Not even kids. People seem to make up all sorts of excuses, but in the end it always boils down to 1) suffering minor inconveniences and 2) the (often[1] irrational) fear of social exile. As other people have pointed out, changing networks is not that hard. It's a false belief that it is. Years ago my local friends were mostly on MSN[2], East European/Middle East folks were on ICQ and Y!C, US people were using AIM. So I used Trillian and later Pidgin. What you saw was this, people are moving around all the time, and many of the persons were 2 or 3x in my contact list because they too were on multiple networks. Google chat just sort of edged itself in there as well. Think of it like this, remember how easy it was to find all your friends on FB because of that network? And didn't the same happen with email, and with AIM/MSN/iCQ/etc? I see friends and acquaintances trickle in on G+ without any effort for that reason (except I don't want to use G+ either). Now FB pushes its "help" quite aggressively, but even without that, people connect in networks, point eachother to their friends, it's very peer-to-peer :) [0] I mean, it happens ... http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html [1] note I'm not saying "always", I can imagine certain high school scenarios where this fear might be somewhat real, although one has to wonder ... [2] unfortunately I lost my MSN acct because the not-hotmail domain I registered it to expired a long long time ago and it stopped working--if anyone knows a solution to that I'd love to hear it because I would love to see that old contact list back :) (however I could also reg a new account and repopulate my contacts via-via just as easy)

freehunter 13y ago
>You can't email someone 13 hours away? >facebook has been replacing those short messages that email or IM used to be used for.

DamnYuppie 13y ago

I don't agree with this. I have had friends spread all over the globe and we still managed to have a call once a week and text regularly. Facebook does nothing to promote or enhance true friendships, it is social lip gloss at best. Yet too many people are to unfilled and shallow to truly see it.

betterunix 13y ago

Not really. My friends are spread out all over the globe. I do not use Facebook. I still manage to email and IM them without any headaches or complaints.

aw3c2 13y ago
That's lucky. What IM do you use? Skype? ;)
- betterunix 13y ago
  It is not "lucky," it is a result of the fact that my friends are actually my friends. For what it's worth, I use jabber.