It's not really practical to do that. You're basically asking people to give up email or their phone at this point. That's how wired into Facebook most people are.
1. Why is facebook required? (to get right to the point) I know MANY of my friends use facebook but I still find it quite easy to keep in touch with them over email/gchat/texting/in person.
2. Are many people you know actually going exclusively to facebook as their sole communication method? This hasn't meshed with my experience, but I'm in a very limited population strata. As a followup, do these people find any difficulties when connecting with non-facebookers, since I know plenty of those?
3. Is it a conscious calculation for you/most people you know? e.g. is there even a thought of "Am I happy with the tradeoffs at hand to use this" or is it just the accepted dogma at this point. I don't mean to demean the group by suggesting that, I've certainly watched myself do the same in hindsight to other things (video games), but I do wonder if it's at least being considered.
For a lot of social circles, facebook is the only service that almost everyone will regularly check and that lets you coordinate events. My friends who don't use facebook will regularly miss (or not get invited to) parties, book club, skiing trips, etc. This isn't because no one likes them or thinks to invite them, it's because they opted out of the platform.
The other big point of stickiness that I can think of is that facebook is many people's cloud. Years of photos are backed up there and only there. It's unfortunate that they've relinquished control of their files to a closed-platform third party, but that's the way it is.
Clearly it is, unless you make a conscious decision for every gathering to only include people via Facebook. Does no one ever stop and think "Hey, Jake is pretty cool but he doesn't use Facebook. Maybe someone should call him?" I'd guess that no one thinks like this, and that his omission comes from simply not thinking to invite people who aren't on Facebook.
I'd love it if you could explain that I'm wrong and that you are making this conscious decision to exclude them. The justification for this would be even more interesting.
The situation of course is already familiar in the business world and many companies try to mitigate this kind of risks by supporting open source for example, or open standards.
It's more frequent for me with parties of 100+ invites.
The way I accidentally don't invite people is
1. I setup Facebook event.
2. I scroll through a list of my friends on Facebook.
3. As I scroll through I invite any friends I think would have a good time at the party and are in town.
4. Never realize I didn't to invite Jake.
5. During or day after party I wonder why Jake didn't come. Then remember that he doesn't have Facebook
I don't think most people sit down and try to remember every person they know. Then create a list of people to invite and then use Facebook to invite them. I think they go through Facebook and invite the ones they recognize similar to the way I do it. It's also hard to keep track of who is, and isn't using Facebook at any given time.
I'm throwing a party on Sunday. I don't throw parties very often. The last time I did was a little over a year ago. I created a Facebook event for parties as I usually do, and about half the people I invited didn't even see the invite (Facebook helpfully tells you who has and hasn't seen such things). So I had to chase down these people through other means (texting, hangouts, and yes, FB messenger). Last year when I did this, pretty much everyone saw the invite.
I'm not sure what changed. Perhaps it's notification fatigue, perhaps some quit or curtailed their use of Facebook. But it kind of sucks from my perspective, as there is no clear better alternative. I do not know the email addresses of all my friends, and people aren't necessarily responsive to email either.
Demographic here is late 20s-late 30s, in the Bay Area.
1. People use it for event planning. I don't get texts asking where I am anymore or what i'm doing. Events are organized... Personally, I despise this because I love impromptu meetups, but that's just not how my friends do things anymore it seems.
2. For all non-business communication the answer is yes. Professional contact is still E-mail driven (or Slack/IRC for dev-friends). That said, LinkedIn is starting to pickup some of the professional communication in my circles.
3. I've been okay with the trade-offs, but that decision fits my social profile. I have to make an active effort now to get invited to things though which kind of sucks, but I suppose that's OK too since it allows me to be more selective about what I go to.
My main circle of friends, clustered in our late-40s for the most part, use a variety of different online media. Facebook and email are primary, though I wouldn't say either is ahead of the other at this point. Texting is of course very common. Facebook Messenger has been our primary chat for the last couple years.
We're also on Twitter and Instagram, at least big chunks of us are. One connected subgroup of us with a common interest have been on a private google groups for a long while, and a private yahoo group for years before that. We set up slack for the group this week.
In other words, we're using whatever seems handiest at the moment for whatever it is we're doing. It's not a particularly tech-savvy group of people, though nearly all of my main circle is quite well-educated.
I don't use FB, but it turns out that people can form pretty strong bonds over incidental things. At least those bonds appear to be strong to the people on the outside, and that's all that really matters when you're talking about social stuff.
At this point in my life, the costs are negligible, but ten years ago those same cost would have been closer to 'devestaating'.
FTFY
> 1. Why is facebook required? (to get right to the
> point) I know MANY of my friends use facebook but I
> still find it quite easy to keep in touch with them
> over email/gchat/texting/in person.
I have a reasonably large extended family. We could start up a mailing list, but we're not all related to the same people. When I see them in person, I have been "keeping in touch" because I've been seeing their family photos, seeing daily updates from them, and interacting with them. Again, I don't have the time or energy to do this actively.
We have a party organized this weekend. There are 40 people on the invite list. A Facebook event has meant that we've invited a whole load of people who we might not have invited to a more intimate event, but also that we got suggestions for a bunch of people to invite - we went through our friends list, and often thought "haven't seen Joe in ages! I'd forgotten he was in town, let's invite him". Facebook has kept track of who's coming for us, and will gently nag our guests to reply either way. We don't have cellphone numbers of email addresses for many of these people.
Conversely, a couple we don't know very well has invited us to an event in a fortnight. We're not that close to them, but we can see on Facebook that a whole bunch of our mutual friends who we do really really like are going. As a result, we'll probably go.
Many of these things are possible without Facebook, they're just much much harder, and we probably wouldn't bother.
> 2. Are many people you know actually going exclusively
> to facebook as their sole communication method? This
> hasn't meshed with my experience, but I'm in a very
> limited population strata. As a followup, do these
> people find any difficulties when connecting with
> non-facebookers, since I know plenty of those?
I have three ex colleagues who I'd love to be more in touch with, who aren't on Facebook. I try and see them when I am in the same city as them, but I often forget they're around, and because I'm not up to date with what's going on in their lives, we often have less to talk about.
> 3. Is it a conscious calculation for you/most people
> you know? e.g. is there even a thought of "Am I happy
> with the tradeoffs at hand to use this" or is it just
> the accepted dogma at this point.
The trade-offs seem hard to articulate. I don't feel like my social graph is particularly private. There are plenty of things that I do like to keep private, but Facebook knowing who my friends and family are isn't really one of them.
Anyway, hope this wall of text helps a little.
2. Messenger + some Snapchat basically. I have only one friend that didn't make the switch to Facebook and keeps on using old IM software that used to be popular. Our friendship (wasn't a huge one) kind of died cause of it.
3. I don't think most people care. It's the way things are. Most also seem to be fairly aware of what's being exposed publicly and curate their behavior accordingly.
I have to note I basically only have friends online. I'm 22, I kind of consider myself an early adopter. Just 4-5 years ago it was pretty weird to most, nowadays its slowly entering the mainstream. Younger people seem especially adept.
Because Facebook has a searchable, discoverable database of real names. Many people skip or haven't gotten to the "write down each others' contact information" step but still want to talk to each other. Actually there is a deliberate, important progression in a relationship from using Facebook Messenger to exchanging cell phone numbers.
>2. Are many people you know actually going exclusively to facebook as their sole communication method?
Yes. Some people have international friends or care about proper handling of long messages, delivery confirmation, read receipts, etc. excluding SMS. Some people have friends with Androids, excluding iMessage. Some people have friends with Outlook.com or Yahoo email addresses, which excludes GChat/Hangouts. People are too scattered around Whatsapp/Telegram/WeChat for any of them to be worth anything. Everyone has Facebook. The cognitive overhead of "Which of 8 different services do I use to talk to this particular friend?" is fucking annoying and people avoid it by just using Facebook.
Many people in my (millennial) generation touch their emails as little as possible. Email is for bosses, professors, receipts, and annoying mailing lists. People I know are as likely to write a social email as they are to walk to their local Western Union office and ask to send a telegram.
>3. Is it a conscious calculation for you/most people you know?
Yes. Facebook is the only option inclusive of everyone, even those with the cheapest, broken phones that are out of free space.
If you have only 1 or 2 of those in your network, isn't the big 'one IM service to rule them all' idea dead? If you already are at a point where it's "FB for most, except for mail/whatever for X", is it a big step to "everyone chooses what to use again"? The overhead is already there, no?
All I can say is: This works fine for me. I have neither FB nor WhatsApp (I stopped using the former a long time ago and never joined the latter). People can reach me just fine and ~probably~ get a faster response from me anyway. I really don't understand this whole concept. "Overhead" to contact someone? Let's be real here: Either you care about contacting someone or you don't. If you don't, then I'd just not name them a 'Friend'. If you do, the mental exercise to open a different app (like - mail) shouldn't even be worth mentioning?
> Either you care about contacting someone or you don't.
Cuts both ways. If Facebook is someone's primary communication system and you refuse to use it, then you don't particularly care about contacting them either.
>"Overhead" to contact someone?
Most groups of friends I'm aware of have running group chats. In an effort to be inclusive of people with Androids, many switched from iMessage to Facebook. But if you refused to use Facebook and an event was planned that way, yes, someone would have to make the effort to reach out to you individually. Overhead. Even if they really like you despite your self-righteous inconveniencing of everyone else, it's not obvious whose responsibility it should be to bridge between Facebook and your smoke signals, and they're likely to forget sometimes.
> between Facebook and your smoke signals
Whoa there. I'd say that was both a bit over the top, no?
I'll end my participation in this thread with this: Obviously anyone/everyone can choose to use FB - I never tried to talk a single person out of using it. I consider it utterly useless for me, personally, and am so far unconvinced by any 'you have to use it or miss out' arguments and certainly don't buy the 'you are inconveniencing your peers' line of thought.
Yes. Absolutely. People communicate via Facebook Messenger instead of SMS or the likes of WhatsApp. They organise social events using Facebook. Announce weddings and divorces, births of children, new jobs. Everything via Facebook. You're clearly not a Facebook user (or not a regular user) otherwise you would know the extent to which people are using it.
And most people really don't care about Facebook privacy issues to any significant degree. It's more convenient to use Facebook and have compromised privacy than not to use Facebook for many.
Although, I don't know why I would ditch it. At least now I decide what they have in the profile on me. (afaik)
I don't run it on my phone. Only log in when I hear there is an event I need to organise, or a message i need to send to a long lost friend or something of that kind.
Drop all the apps. Use the web interface.
It really is quite simple to live without FB.
And by which I'm not saying that negatively. You perhaps have a group of friends who are not big social media users or that use Facebook and the like to organise almost every aspect of their social lives.
For me, I would say if I wasn't using Facebook I would be missing out. The biggest thing I would be missing out on would be keeping up to date and in contact with a multitude of friends and family back in the UK where I'm originally from (I live in Australia now).
Sure, there is always email but many friends and family don't use email very much any more and it would be me expecting them to change their habits to suit my preferences.
Know what? May be it does not matter. May be it is a "learned necessity". For example, you don't need to have facebook to keep up to date with all the family members. You just need to call your mom back home and have a chat with her once in a while. Wouldn't you think that would be much healthy way to do this that steals very little of your time and attention?
The lion's share of my friends, and their friends, and their friends, are not on and posting to Facebook almost at all. For most of them it's just an app to schedule events.
A lot of the now college students a generation younger than me are using it like Twitter if at all -- self-promotion for the ones that are like event promoters or self-styled social movers, and passive consumption of that traffic.
The only reason I'm on it at all is because I moved pretty far away from home, and folks in my parents' generation and/or geography in the last year or two seriously dug into it en masse. So, I post to remind Mom I'm still alive.
Messenger is a thing, WhatsApp and Instagram are things. But the core Facebook is hollowing out with the people I interact with, and they're quite the opposite from Luddites or technophobes.
Success for that company is a assured as their ability to acquire the next big social connection app. When they stop making good bets, we'll see how they're doing I guess.
After this comes the next solution, and next, and then next. Think about it.
Edit: of course I am half joking, but only half.
"I should never have allowed my friends to use their telephone in the way they want!"
"I should in fact terminate my friendships with any hooligans who don't use my preferred choice of social network!"
(To be honest, this sentiment doesn't make much sense to me)
To be honest, yes, indeed, when it is in your power to help to not to make the mistakes (or at least try). Say for example you see that your friend is drunk and wants to go driving. You have taken the keys but you still return them and your friend dies. I can say that this was also your fault then.
"I should never have allowed my friends to use their telephone in the way they want!"
I think that one should at least make a honest attempt to explain the situation to your friend. Say your friend has installed a hypothetical (but real and fully functional) "Meet the serial killer" app and is hyper super excited about it. Would you then at least somehow try to say that this is maybe really not a good idea? Or not?
I should in fact terminate my friendships with any hooligans who don't use my preferred choice of social network!"
You mean a Facebook friendship? Or could you maybe explain why you should terminate your friendship with your friend? Sounds silly to me, to be honest.
(To be honest, this sentiment doesn't make much sense to me)
I am sorry.