I have lately come to realize that another side-effect of the social networking craze affects people who check email often and is affected by people who don't. Allow me to explain.
Even before the days of Facebook and Classmates and Twitter and Whatever, when having only one email address was the norm, these folks might take weeks to respond to any email message sent to their lone email address.
But now with many forms of email and messaging available via all their social networking pages, these same folks are, oddly enough, just as disinclined to respond quickly (if at all), so the problem is multiplied as more senders have more avenues to capturing more recipients' inattention.
Sending four messages to a person who normally doesn't check email regularly anyway simply gives that person three more opportunities --- and perhaps three more reasons, three more rationales --- to be disinclined to respond. If you talk to a deaf man who can't read lips, he can't help you; if you yell at him, he still can't help you; if you yell at him multiple times, he still can't help you.
My admittedly bordering-on-obsessive behavior when it comes to checking and answering email (and this is my problem, I admit) simultaneously does and does not scale well in a socially connected world populated with routinely disconnected people.
It does because I'm made for this era. It doesn’t because others aren’t.
Either everyone who doesn’t check email regularly has to come around soon, or I do.
Which do I think is most likely? Hmmm... let me think about it and I’ll send you an email.
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