Because a lot of my work is with young kids, it is actually surprising to see how much email is actually used, but not for conversations. For a lot of the 16-22 year olds that we we work with, email is home base. it serves different purposes of notification, sign-ups, verifications, cloud storage, and archiving, but not direct communication. So a lot of emailing is a trigger action rather than information transfer. One of my PhDs calls this an extended cybernetic loop without a closure, because emails are used to direct attention and click on things. This does beggar the question of where to people do long-form writing. And the only thing I can sense is that they don't. If it is not going on a blog or on social media posts, it is not going anywhere. Instead, different ideas seem to go on multiple platforms, and surprisingly, emails sometimes become the consolidating drivers that stitch them all together.
I, personally, just queer the thing by writing whatsapp messages that scroll to an infinity and facebook posts which defy good advice of brevity and ramble at will. On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 1:21 AM Charles Haynes <charles.hay...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, 3 Jan 2019 at 19:08, Thaths <tha...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 9:47 AM Dave Long <dave.l...@bluewin.ch> wrote: > > > > > > These days I think [email] is mostly used by us old fogies. > > > Fair enough, but what, pray tell, do all those non-old-fogies use to > > > convey thoughts that are too long for social media comments and too > short > > > for blog posts? > > > > > > > Not being on most popular social media (Twitter, FB, etc.) I am not > > qualified to answer this. But when have I let such trivialities get in > the > > way of offering my opinions? :-) > > > > I posit that one way the youth of today are conveying their thoughts in > > through non-textual means: Through Snapchat (i.e., marked up > > photos/images), and through the sharing of meme images/animations. One > > mixed (textual and non-textual) medium popular in many parts of the world > > (and with many parallels to emails/mailing lists) seems to be WhatsApp > and > > similar messaging apps. > > > > It seems to me that none of those media support the kind of thing Dave was > asking about: "too long for social media comments and too short for blog > posts" does that mean they just don't do that sort of communicating? > > -- Charles > -- Dr. Nishant Shah (Ph.D.) Director (Research), Centre for Internet and Society,Bangalore, India ( www.cis-india.org ) International Tandem Partner, Inkubator - Leuphana University, Lueneburg, Germany # +49-0176-841-660-87 http://www.facebook.com/nishant.shah http://cis-india.academia.edu/NishantShah
