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PM tension (a slightly mealy-mouthed apology)

00:58 / 08.08.06

This is a sort of generalised apology disguised as a half-hearted attempt at stimulating discussion. For a while, I've been sitting on the awareness that, when it comes to Private Messages on Barbelith, I'm a bit shit. It's partly down to my tendency to procrastinate on anything that sounds even vaguely complicated ("I'll sort that out later") and partly consequent upon a rather disturbing new habit I've noticed in myself: after a night's imbibing lovely lovely alcohol, I log in, see new PMs and resolve to sort them out later. Then, in the light of sobriety, forget all about them.

So... for all those to whom I've done this, please accept a collective apology. If you still want to talk about whatever it was you wanted to talk to me about, would you mind PMing again? I promise I'll answer this time.

D'oh. Etc. I'm a fool.

01:03 / 08.08.06

Oh yeah, the discussion bit.

Have you ever been shit at corresponding, and/or found a novel way of not writing back when you know that's exactly what y'should be doing? Tell me about it, and make me feel less guilty.

01:37 / 08.08.06

Too little too late. I'm not sure I'll ever forgive you. *sob*

paranoidwriter waves hello

03:34 / 08.08.06

I do it all the time, mainly with missed phone calls, and usually because I think to myself, "If I call them back, what am I going to say? 'My life's shit, how's yours'?" If at all possible, I just don't like to bring people down with my darkness, so I often avoid calls from people who I love dearly because I don't want them to be concerned -- I'll usually construct an Email instead at some point so at the very least they know I'm not ignoring them and I'm alive (etc)

So yeah, Ganesh. You're not alone in being crap at replying, even if our reasons are different.

07:57 / 08.08.06

Ganesh, I've had to spend the last fortnight re-plotting an entire novel because you didn't bother to reply to my PM, you swine.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

08:11 / 08.08.06

I'm terrible for this. Honestly, it's usually because I have brainfreeze and simply can't think of anything to say. Not one word.

Regrettable Juvenilia

08:52 / 08.08.06

I'm awful at this as well! It's because when I see I have a new message I have to click it there and then, but then without that "you have 1 new message" notification I forget all about it...

08:53 / 08.08.06

You know when you haven't replied to someone for ages so you don't contact them because you feel guilty? In my social circle we call that 'Poping' as in 'Have you spoken to X?', 'Ooh no, I'm poping her a bit at the moment.'
The answer is to phone up/email/text/write/visit for no reason I've found, otherwise it can stretch out for years.

Ninjas make great pets

09:56 / 08.08.06

Ive kinda been living via pm for years.. the aul analogue method. I seem to be on opposite ends of the day to my house mates for .. eight years? (quite impressive in an odd way). we communicate via notepads in the kitchen. Stupid things.
The latest housemate is websavy though so it's now email comms - does lack the old world charm of pen and paper.

Totally agree with the call/mail/etc for no reason way. Keep the lines open.. as a certain gravel mouthed actor says "its gud to toalk"

10:02 / 08.08.06

You know when you haven't replied to someone for ages so you don't contact them because you feel guilty?

Or because you still don't have time, and feel like there's no point in calling to say "Hi, I still don't have time!"

Meh.

--Ember--

10:04 / 08.08.06

This isn’t a rare condition, Ganesh. I’m just the same. If I don’t reply straight away, I never do it.

So I try to be quite disciplined about that and make some reply as soon as I read the email/PM/whatever, even if it’s barely more than an acknowledgement. I’ve had to get over the idea that the first reply has to be definitive. And I find I'm more inclined to follow-up with another at my leisure if my conscience is clear and I’m not ‘poping’.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

10:40 / 08.08.06

God, I do this all the time, probably more so in real life, but I'm getting better.

I like the word "poping", though. Where does it originate?

10:56 / 08.08.06

The Pope. I forget why, it's either because he has the same name as me, or because he never ever returns my calls, or we named it drunk and forgot although it seemed hilarious at the time.

I occasionally use the metaphor of a river- you've got to dredge those channels of communication otherwise they get all silty. Just the action of saying 'Hi I have no time but I am alive and love you still' keeps the psychic phone lines open.

11:04 / 08.08.06

You clearly don’t know your Joan Osbourne.
"Nobody calling on the phone / *Except* for the Pope maybe in Rome."

12:29 / 08.08.06

He never calls me. Must be busy with that Osbourne woman.

14:06 / 08.08.06

I am so crap at keeping in touch and additionally I sometimes need to focus on here/now rather than making calls or writing letters so I have been known to write a bundle of postcards saying something like this:

"I'm just not in the mood to be in touch with the outside world right now, but I'll be sorted again soon and then I'll make contact. If you want to call and don't mind that I'm a bit uncommunicative at the mo you are very welcome to do so."

So effective. I like to take space without worrying about whether friends are misconstruing my silence.

*

15:45 / 08.08.06

I feel like I should reply to this thread, but I don't have much to say. But I feel guilty for not doing so. There are also other threads I feel guilty for not replying to just now. And there are people I should email.

Argh.

trouble at bill

16:57 / 08.08.06

I feel this acutely, all the bloody time. However, I am starting to think that this feeling should be ignored as much as is humanly possible, for the following reasons which both stem from the Malaise of Modernity(TM).

First, I find myself in jobs which involve large amounts of ‘enforced’ social contact, both with colleagues and for what of a less dreadful term, ‘customers’, and so have (I imagine) far less ‘social energy’ for dealings with friends than I would have if I were working alone or in less ‘populous’ jobs. (In particular, the staff-student ratio in most teaching jobs these days is nigh on unbearable for all concerned, studies showing that most teachers engage in some thousands of social interactions during any one working day.) But I can’t believe this is particularly unusual by today’s standards, or peculiar to teaching or my other jobs… surely this is something we all have to deal with as a basic fact of modern life?

Second, I am starting to increasingly agree with Terry Eagleton (and prolly countless others) that modern methods of communications like pm’s, e-mails, texts etc increase the quantity of communication while actually decreasing its quality. The mobile phone is all very well if you are in the middle of nowhere and need medical assistance but texting trivia to people at the other end of the country seems to me to be a great way of at best annoying the shit out of them and at worst genuinely threatening their metal wellbeing without in any way alleviating the essential loneliness of the human condition. (Balms for which surely include ‘quality communications’ with ‘quality people’, however these might be defined?)

My old papa, Bogg Snr, always says that the mark of a true friendship is that you can restart a conversation which was interrupted or unfinished a year ago without having spoken to that person at all in the intervening time. I think he’s probably right. So anyone who I’ve not responded to in the last few months (and Christ only knows there are enough of you), I’m sure I’m thinking about you loads but as for your message, well, let me put it this way - for now you can just (in the nicest possible way of course) bugger off.

04:38 / 09.08.06

modern methods of communications like pm’s, e-mails, texts etc increase the quantity of communication while actually decreasing its quality

While I understand that this thread is a non-HeadShop thread, I would like to disagree with that notion wholeheartedly.

If communication is judged on quality of information-transfer, than the more information that is being transferred is better. If there is more communication, than there is more information transferring, thus better communication.

Whether you think that the communication is clear or not depends on both parties and the method of communication. Either way, more ways to communicate is much better than less ways of communicating. If you can't make your friend understand you in text messaging, than perhaps they can understand you in message board posting.

In a general sense, how do you judge the quality of a specific communication? If the intent is simply to pass on a simple piece of information like a phone-number or a name, than having different outlets means the ease of delivering that name is greater.

I just don't see how increasing the types of communications can lead to the decreasing of the quality of communication.

07:11 / 09.08.06

If communication is judged on quality of information-transfer, than the more information that is being transferred is better. If there is more communication, than there is more information transferring, thus better communication.

Matt, that isn't true. You seem to be mixing up qualative and quantative. Quantity of communication will not in itself produce quality information. Think of spam.

In a general sense, how do you judge the quality of a specific communication?

I'm going to attempt rough guess rather than fixed answers but howsabout that said communication should contain a variety of these factors - responisve to previous communications, directly useful, content heavy and reciprocal/ open to feedback. The speed and ease of a lot of modern communication cuts against a lot of these factors (though at the same time, you have to acknowledge it opens up new possibilites).

The resistable rise of Reidcourchie

07:41 / 09.08.06

I owe an apology to Toksik, s/he PMed me a while back about something and I didn't find it for months, purely because I'm not on Barbelith very much and when I did I was too embaressed to PM hir back.

ONLY NICE THINGS

07:51 / 09.08.06

I think we can also factor aesthetics into that. Although there is no absolute rule that emails should not be so carefully imagined or so painstakingly assembled as letters, there are a couple of factors that feed into why they often are. The first is probably that the mechanism for creating the message and the mechanism for sending it are basically identical - there is no clear break point. Compare this to, say, the mechanism by which you create a letter and the mechanism by which you send it. Another is thhe ease of emendation. If you can change a word or phrase without breaking scene, as it were - again, by using the same process as you do when creating a word, I suspect you will be less likely to think about your wording before writing it, and then subsequently more likely to leave that inexact word. If you compare that to the process of pen-and-ink writing, again, especially when you get to the blotting-paper level, there's a difference again.

of course, none of this means that electronic communication needs to be less well-thought out than the alternatives. Only that some of the technologies might make it easier for it to be so.

Disco is My Class War

05:48 / 10.08.06

I am terrible at this. I'm hopeless at replying to PM's (or knowing when a PM exchange is finished) but worse, I practice panic-avoidance of quite important professional emails.

I know I'm really getting screwed up when I haven't written or phoned someone for a while and find myself thinking, 'That bastard! Ze hasn't contacted me for months! Some friend!' Then I check my inbox and lo and behold, it was me that didn't call/write back. How embarrassment.

Perhaps the problem with so many different kinds of communication (and more) is that memory fails, finally. I can only remember to reply to about ten emails per day. I get far more than this in a day. Hence, I reply to the ones that are immediately important or that don't involve too much thought/angst, or that facilitate procrastination. The rest? Forget it. Literally.

Text messages, I find, are just like being on the phone, but you bump into more trees. Thus, I can only have a text conversation with one person at a time. This makes me seem quite rude in comparison to the people who reply to a text message with 5 seconds of you having sent it.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

14:30 / 10.08.06

I always have a problem with ongoing text message conversations. At some point I'm bound to either run out of credit or have things to do, but I never know whether to just stop responding or say something like "gotta go", in which case I always fear it will sound like I'm telling the other person that their last joke was shit. Either way I always feel like I'm being rude in not offering another one in exchange...

14:55 / 10.08.06

I never know whether to just stop responding or say something like "gotta go", in which case I always fear it will sound like I'm telling the other person that their last joke was shit. Either way I always feel like I'm being rude in not offering another one in exchange...

Interesting, Stoatie. In my mind text is such an unreliable medium - even if by some chance the networks forward the message efficiently there are still a large number of factors; batteries, credit, signal strength, busyness, as you say - that the conversation might cease without notice at any point. So I take the 'no-reply means nothing' attitude with texts. Most other interfaces too though, unless I am having one of those particularly bad days where I'm only seeing El mundo malo(link just explains term in sense of Starhawk novel) in the funhouse mirror of my imagination.

17:33 / 10.08.06

Texting is not tennis. I hate it when people get pissed off I didn't send them a text saying 'OK' or 'Haha'. IT'S A WASTE OF TIME! I'M SEEING YOU IN TEN FUCKING MINUTES! IF IT'S THAT IMPORTANT THEN PHONE ME!

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

22:29 / 10.08.06

See, the thing is, to the best of my knowledge nobody has EVER actually got pissed off or offended when I don't respond. I'm just always worried that they might...

23:38 / 10.08.06

I read this thread this afternoon, and happened to go looking for an email I'd "sent" to a former student with a serious question almost 2 months ago. It's not in my sent box! But I know I sent a response--a long thoughtful one. I'm so irritated!

Also, I have many that I know I haven't responded to. As someone upthread mentioned, I also often have a harder time with the emails that are professionally-related, which I think has to do with anxiety and my own resistance to professional life, than I do for more "extra curricular" concerns (e.g., barbelith).... Argh. So there's a paternal voice in my head barking, "Where are your priorities, young lady?"

But, additionally, I also sometimes put off ones that I know are going to require more thought and care than I have time for at the moment, or am too wine-boggled to deal with.

So, Ganesh, I, for one, forgive your lapses and am authorized by the Church of Barbelith to both grant absolution and prescribe penance.--just say 20 Hail Judith Butlers and call, or PM!, me in the morning.

00:04 / 11.08.06

'I'm so popular'n'special'n'important that I choose to a)not bother replying to e-mails, phone calls, texts and so on, which ok, b)I might have forgotten about, which would be defensible, it's easily enough done, unless c)I was replying to thread on the internet about how awful I was, rather than actually catching up with the correspondence.'

Forgetting about PM's on Barbelith is one thing I suppose - almost certainly, no one cares that much, but if you don't reply to messages from your proper, real life friends, then you're basically buying into the Thatcher/Blair vision of an atomised society, and it's not so good. I'm actually a bit horrified by the pride people seem to be taking in the phone calls they don't/can't/won't, or just haven't got round to returning, interweb self-flagellation being in this sort of context a form of narcissism.

The danger is that by age sixty, or fifty, or forty, all there'll be left is the pale bar fire, the kids at the weekend and the nightly orgy of Next Gen DVD's.

I don't I suppose I have to paint a picture - the point of being human is to be sociable, really, so answer your e-mails, your phone calls and so on as reasonably possible, because you'll regret if you don't. Damnit.