One of my friends, who I’ve only known for a quarter-century wondered how we manage communication, She has four different email accounts, three WhatsApp groups; texts via mobile phone and Facebook account and DMs on Twitter and Facebook.
I’m exhausted just reading the trimmed list.
There were times in the past, it seems, that most people we wanted to reach could be accessed by a single methodology, first by letter, then by phone. As technology has grown, and users’ learning curves differ, it seems more difficult to contact everyone.
Most snail mail I throw into a drawer and leave until it’s nearly full. Then once a month, the great purge, sorting the recyclable from the shreddable material.
Our olde cellphones
Both my wife and I don’t text much because our phones, hers most especially, are old. When my sister became injured a couple years back, the conversations on my phone came through, but not the graphics. Incidentally, I don’t know how old my phone IS. I know it’s less than five years, from something I blogged. Subsequently, I lost that phone in a hotel and had to get a new one, which drains battery power far too quickly. So the phone is off unless I initiate its use.
My wife was added to a text chat and didn’t even know it. She missed some info about a topic of import to her. Now her phone is prehistoric, more than a decade old, possibly older than a certain teenager we know. Actually, my wife will be getting a new phone soon, but we had to wait for the service provider to change hands.
People who text don’t understand folks who don’t.
There was the mom of a friend of my daughter. I could call her on the phone, leave a message, but never get a response. If I Instant Messaged her on Facebook, nearly instant response. But when my daughter IMs me, and I’m not online, she’ll call me to scold me to check my Facebook. Why she can’t just TELL me the info, now that she reached me?
The landline phone answering machine is iffy. I’ll get a message, but if my wife plays it back, I might not notice until the number of recorded messages gets long enough.
I know people who have email but check it only sporadically. It appears to be my primary form of communication. But it will be overwhelmingly crowded until November because every Democratic candidate for President and their common opponent contact me constantly. I delete most of them quickly, but still.
Oh, I should check my AOL account every three months. I keep it as a “recovery for passwords” email. What IS my AOL password? I’ll need to get a recovery text.
I have Twitter and Instagram and LinkedIn, but I seldom actually look at any of them. At least I don’t have to manage communications at the job anymore. No work email or phone mail or snail mail messages. <?strong>