Keeping in Touch

[forestofglory]

I want to talk about how I correspond with people who don't have much online presence. That is people who don't have and LJ or DW or do any online writing.

For email there are two friends that I send an email a week to. One of the them writes back regularly, the other irregularly. I have set days to send the emails. They are maybe 500 words long, and just talk about my daily life. (Sometimes I recycle bits of them into DW entries, and sometimes I recycle bits of DW entries into my emails.)

For keeping in touch emails the perfect really is the enemy of the good. My irregular corespondent sometimes tries to wait until enough interesting things have happened to be worth writing an email. I just try to write one a week. I'd rather get an email more frequently. (Also I generally don't find daily life boring.) I also find writing one at certain time is much easier then replying right away to anything I get back.

I have one friend to whom I write a postcard once a week. Then I send postcards to other friends occasionally as well. Postcards are nice because they are a real physical thing you can hold. I think this makes them Unlike letters postcards to not require replies. I also enjoy collecting postcards when I'm traveling.

I had one friend whom I was writing letters to, but she moved to Mexico where the postal service is quite bad so I've been writing her emails instead. These don't really have schedule, just when I feel like it. Which seems to work ok so far.

Other than DW and LJ I don't use a lot of social media. (And I seem to keep meeting new people here.)

I've given up on never feeding facebook at all, but it doesn't really feel like social connection. More like a news service about people's lives most of whom I'm not very close to. (It is also useful for me for some real news.) I kind of enjoy having a lot people notice things when I post there.

I used to use IM a bit, but now I only really use it for talking with R when we are at computers in different rooms. Even when more people used it I was always shy about starting conversations.

I don't have twitter account. I do sometimes find myself reading other people's feeds, so it might be worth having an account for that. But then again I don't have a smart phone, and I often go for hours and hours with out being online, which doesn't really go well with the twitter mentally.

(This post is based on comments I made on liv's post about conversions and keeping in touch with people. Also if you would like postcard please PM me your address.)

Comments

[sorrillia]

I don't really use social media at all, and it does seem to impact my ability to keep in touch with a lot of people pretty severely. I get the impression that a lot of people I know really only communicate that way with people they don't see in person, so a lot of time I find out news about my friends by being told by other people "so-and-so posted this on Facebook a while ago". The main thing that makes me wish I used Facebook, though, is that no one uses RSS readers anymore except for me, and I'd really like to have a way to get my friends to notice my Wordpress blog posts.

Back in undergrad, my high school best friend and I exchanged weekly emails that averaged around five thousand words each and were sometimes twice that. I'm not really sure how we managed it, and I don't think I could now, but the fact that I can't makes me kind of sad.

Part of why I don't really send long emails to people anymore, though, is that almost no one ever responds. And the usual reason is in fact that they decide they need to write a perfect response and they don't have time to, so they put it off until they entirely forget. The same problem has come up with writing paper letters: almost no one I know except that one friend from high school ever replies, and she usually takes a month or two to write back. I used to send out paper letters to friends quite frequently, but now I only do it once a year really. I do still, though, send out a huge number (one hundred last year) of letters to essentially everyone I know each December. I only get about ten replies, but doing them in bulk, and typing them in LaTeX so I can recycle bits makes it easier to produce them all, and I figure that it helps keep my friends at least mildly aware of how I'm doing, even if I don't really hear back.

I do try to send people postcards whenever I travel, and am a bit surprised to find that I know at least two people who actually fairly consistently send me postcards when they travel, too.

I do use IM to talk to people fairly much, but there are only a couple people who really seem up to holding long conversations that way, so it's of limited utility.