EJCC
The Devil of TypoC
- Joined
- Aug 29, 2008
- Messages
- 19,129
- MBTI Type
- ESTJ
- Enneagram
- 1w9
- Instinctual Variant
- sp/so
- Harder to include othersWhat's wrong with email?
- Would clutter my already-cluttered inbox
- Wouldn't be invited to anything
- Takes more mental energy; email etiquette is much more formal than Facebook in my experience
- Facebook has profiles you can go off of; places where you can quickly and easily see how people interact with others, what their interests are, what their priorities are, how they use Facebook. Email starts you from scratch and makes for LOTS of small talk to get the exact same information
The first reason is the main one; even when you do mass emailing, it feels much more individualized. When used well, Facebook wall conversations/private message conversations can flow exactly like group discussions (in person or on a forum). From my experience, email can't even come close to replicating that.
Also I am curious to the answer to [MENTION=8936]highlander[/MENTION]'s question -- since IME Facebook's privacy settings are very easy to figure out, and very reliable when you get them right and when you learn to expect revision.
In fairness, it's more like "you and this dude have a shit ton of mutual friends, so you probably know him" -- which is very often the case. I agree when it's only like one mutual friend and you're thinking "why the hell are they recommending some random dude from Jordan to me?"Well, my post was focusing more on a macro level than a micro level, but that's great it's a net-positive for you. The nature of the medium is one that both enables and encourages mass accumulation of users, so explicitly that they're constantly trying to link you together with other users using the most vague and trivial of criteria to establish a pseudo-connection between users(Hello X, We'll recommend Y as a friend. You and him just so happened to have pissed in the same airport urinal 7 years ago on your trip to Delaware).
I never understood people who have a lot of Facebook friends they MET on Facebook and never spoke to irl -- because as I understand it (and I'd like to think I understand it well), that's not the point of Facebook.
I suppose you're right. From my perspective, it's a lot easier than maintaining that connection via email or near-constant texting -- but maybe it's different for others.Your experience is a result of a desire to connect to a subset of individuals; I imagine there's a concerted amount of effort on your end to establish said connection, and would have a greater likelihood of persisting in a cross-medium platform with the people you've chosen to friend, than, say, the person who has accumulated 700+ friends.
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