Blog Week 4
I decided to write to my mother, in 3 different ways. The letter felt like it had a more personal quality to it, seeing as I wrote it by hand, and so had this affordance of being almost more intimate. Sadly, however, at the time of writing, she has not yet received it.
Next up was email, and this was coloured by my experiences of using email in the past. Easy enough, and containing more or less similar thoughts as the letter, but it was more businesslike, wanting to almost prepare her with a subject line and a sender before she’d even opened the message.I usually tend to communicate this way only for university or for work purposes, and while the affordance for social contact is there, it is not one I am used to in this medium.
Thirdly, was sending her a message over Facebook. This was easy and quick, and felt totally normal to engage in a social activity - that is what Facebook is built for. That said, no matter how preferable it was to me, I harbor zero hope to ever receive a reply to that particular message. For while my mother does have a Facebook account, she has not logged on or used it in two years. There is an interesting contrast in that.
While I find Facebook familiar and easy to navigate, she refuses to engage with it out of unfamiliarity. This is almost a limitation of her generation rather than that of Facebook.
References:
Hutchby, Ian. “Technologies, Texts and Affordances.” Sociology, vol. 35, no. 2, 1 May 2001, pp. 441–446.
