As a student, my classmates and I use Facebook groups to organize activities. If, for example, the stage manager announces via Facebook that there will be rehearsal at a specific time, or that you should bring $5 for the director's gift, it'd be pretty stupid for all 35 cast members to reply "k" and nobody does this. But the message needs to reach all of them, and the SM has no idea who's been informed, so instead he gives himself carpel-tunnel texting everyone individually (because there is a social expectation that you acknowledge texts.)
A stage manager is in serious trouble if half the cast didn't know to show up, so he'll do it the hard way if he has to. But for large, informal social groups, people who don't use Facebook as actively simply fall through the cracks. I'm part of a roughly 30-member group that gets together to watch hilariously awful movies. We organize on Facebook, and people who don't happen to see our posts get left behind and forget about it. If the host of a movie night could easily see who already knows about it, he can contact the others by phone or in person, increasing engagement with the group while respecting those who silently declined.
Being able to see who you've already reached makes Facebook a pretty massive convenience in cases where it previously had no advantage, increasing engagement with both Facebook itself and the real-world entities represented by Facebook groups. I'd call it a win-win.
>If the other person knows you saw their message, then there's the potential for them to perceive your lack of response as rude or a show of obvious disagreement.
This goes both ways. Yes, it does eliminate ambiguity - you saw the message and chose not to respond; there wasn't a technical glitch. But where the person you're talking to would previously have escalated to a more invasive form of communication like a phone call, he now knows there's nothing wrong with Facebook; you're just not interested.
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As a student, my classmates and I use Facebook groups to organize activities. If, for example, the stage manager announces via Facebook that there will be rehearsal at a specific time, or that you should bring $5 for the director's gift, it'd be pretty stupid for all 35 cast members to reply "k" and nobody does this. But the message needs to reach all of them, and the SM has no idea who's been informed, so instead he gives himself carpel-tunnel texting everyone individually (because there is a social expectation that you acknowledge texts.)
A stage manager is in serious trouble if half the cast didn't know to show up, so he'll do it the hard way if he has to. But for large, informal social groups, people who don't use Facebook as actively simply fall through the cracks. I'm part of a roughly 30-member group that gets together to watch hilariously awful movies. We organize on Facebook, and people who don't happen to see our posts get left behind and forget about it. If the host of a movie night could easily see who already knows about it, he can contact the others by phone or in person, increasing engagement with the group while respecting those who silently declined.
Being able to see who you've already reached makes Facebook a pretty massive convenience in cases where it previously had no advantage, increasing engagement with both Facebook itself and the real-world entities represented by Facebook groups. I'd call it a win-win.
>If the other person knows you saw their message, then there's the potential for them to perceive your lack of response as rude or a show of obvious disagreement.
This goes both ways. Yes, it does eliminate ambiguity - you saw the message and chose not to respond; there wasn't a technical glitch. But where the person you're talking to would previously have escalated to a more invasive form of communication like a phone call, he now knows there's nothing wrong with Facebook; you're just not interested.