Dear Professor Davidson,
In your recent HASTAC post, “Facebook’s Messages may not be the right answer but it is the right question,” you bring to light a very important issue that plagues millions of people in today’s world: what is a better system [than email] for communicating with one another in the digital age? While you point at Facebook’s Messages as a system asking that question (and perhaps I’ll agree with you a bit there), I must respectfully disagree with a number of the points you make.
First off, you call email “a disaster,” and then label it as a “transitional invention” that we will “look back on and laugh.” While I do occasionally laugh about emails, I do not think email is anywhere near a disaster. The electronic mail system that we have created and supported is a fantastic method of sending messages across the world. While the norms that have grown and developed with this system may be frustrating, while there may be a lack of genre conventions (as you point out later) in various circles, email is not “a disaster.” You point out that:
[It's] just crazy to think that people who have been trained for the last 150 years by the Industrial Age’s mandate of separating the functions of work, home, leisure, play, business, religion, family, sexuality, social life, entertainment, and so forth would be happy with an email system that merges all of those together in one undifferentiated inbox again.
I’m not sure about you, but no one I know has a life that is so fragmented. I accept that I’ve only been alive for 14% of the timespan that you mention, but even in my life, I can’t imagine a person who has compartmentalized their actual existence into such boxes. The people who come close often become frustrated because they stop being real and they simply play roles. When you are always playing roles, you lose authenticity and humanity. Humans are messy. Life is messy. While we have certain protocols, norms, genres, expected actions and what not, many of those categories you mentioned do (and should) overlap.
For the people who really do want to compartmentalize their inbox, there are a number of solutions. The easiest solution is to use labels. Many different email services provide labeling in their inbox. I currently use Gmail and it works FANTASTIC. When I decide I don’t want to use filters, I create a second email address. Regardless of whether I want to do this or not, my hosting university usually forces one upon me anyway (which many of my peers run through their primary email accounts anyway). A second way to keep your inbox clean is don’t give out your email. If you don’t want Aunt Emma to send you recipes, don’t let her know your email address. If you don’t want her to send recipes to your work email, have them sent somewhere else.
What Facebook did right a long time ago (and continues to do with Messages) is impart on the public the notion that when you are online, people will know if you are a dog. There is no longer this split between who you are online and who you are offline. Social media (and by that I mean the extension of our social networks over the Internet) have made people more visible. You are now accessible 24/7, which means you need to start being yourself 24/7. Facebook has contributed to the authenticity that the Internet is starting to require. Messages is continuing that. I am willing to bet that most people (51% or more) who use messages attempt to integrate their external emails at one point. Why? Because Facebook is the hub of online social interaction for many people. Such integration is not going to make email cleaner. It’s not going to make communication that much different. It is going to centralize it a little bit more for the people who trust Facebook enough to give it access to their other email addresses.
Perhaps I misunderstood your article. I could very easily be off-base here, but it just seems as though you are making criticisms based upon how we use email, and in that regard, I don’t think Facebook Messages will change anything. It will continue to confuse the genre conventions that you have already lamented by making the act of sending messages even more casual.
I welcome any and all feedback on this issue.
Best Regards,
Behzod Sirjani