Keeping in Touch

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.)