My day has been filled with peo­ple mis­us­ing tech­nol­ogy tools as com­mon as voice­mail and email, and as “cut­ting edge” as Face­book sta­tuses and Twit­ter. I’m not an expert or guru or ninja at any of them, but I’d like to think I pay enough atten­tion to see how peo­ple are using these tools and even what the design­ers’ inten­tions were for the tool. Because of that, I get some­thing out of them and even make them work for me. Not enough peo­ple do.

So many peo­ple out there think social net­works are dis­trac­tions, that email in your pocket is unnec­es­sary, or that text mes­sag­ing is going to destroy the Eng­lish lan­guage. The real­ity is they don’t know how to use the tech­nol­ogy or they’re mis­us­ing it which is why they find it use­less or unim­por­tant. These things are impor­tant to me and my gen­er­a­tion, so it’s time to catch up or be left look­ing stu­pid because you’re too old to fig­ure out Face­book let alone email.

I was awoken this morn­ing by a call from a New Hamp­shire num­ber I didn’t know. Groggy and a lit­tle angry, I didn’t answer since I didn’t know who they were or what they wanted. Sure enough they didn’t leave a voice­mail, and I spent my morn­ing walk to class won­der­ing about my morn­ing mys­tery caller.

I wasn’t curi­ous enough to call back because their ini­tial call obvi­ously wasn’t impor­tant enough to leave a mes­sage. If you think peo­ple will call you back with­out leav­ing a mes­sage, guess again. I’m not the only one with too much going on and too many other modes of com­mu­ni­ca­tion to worry about a missed phone call. This was the most minor of mis­uses today, but it irked me enough to con­tinue look­ing for examples.

I get to my first class and get on Face­book because I’m in col­lege (read: hel­luva mul­ti­tasker). As I’m scrolling through my news feed (I love the new Face­book design by the way), I noticed a num­ber of peo­ple past­ing links in their sta­tus instead of shar­ing them prop­erly as videos or news arti­cles. Face­book has taken notice of peo­ple past­ing URLs in their sta­tuses so they’ve begun hyper­link­ing them, but this makes for more work by me, your friend.

Every day more than one of my friends has their sta­tus set to a URL to a YouTube video. YouTube makes it VERY easy to share their videos on Face­book. Face­book actu­ally embeds those videos so you can play them directly in your feed! Why would you take the time to copy the URL from YouTube, login to Face­book, update your sta­tus, and then expect your friends to click on the URL, leave Face­book, watch the video, then come back to Face­book to ‘like it’ or comment?

Shar­ing on Face­book has been stream­lined with the new design. More peo­ple see the video, dis­cus­sions begin, and the social net­work expe­ri­ence becomes more valu­able to every­one. This doesn’t just go for videos but shar­ing news sto­ries and other infor­ma­tion on Face­book (remem­ber me grip­ing about form­ing groups when you can use Facebook’s phone­book?)

Finally in my last class, I was put over the edge and inspired to write this blog post when I received an email from my land­lord. (This isn’t the first time they proved their incom­pe­tence with tech­nol­ogy) Here’s a screen­shot so you know I’m not lying:

pavprop

Yes, the email mes­sage con­cludes by say­ing, “Please DO NOT respond to this email via email.” Should I write them a let­ter, call the office, send a fax, make an appoint­ment to come in, or  send them a mes­sage on Twit­ter? WHY WOULDN’T THEY WANT ME TO PRESS REPLY!? They con­tacted me via this medium so why wouldn’t I use the same medium to respond?

This wasn’t an auto­mated mes­sage from an unmon­i­tored account. It was from one of the own­ers of the com­pany. If an auto­mated billing ser­vice were noti­fy­ing us, it’s totally under­stand­able to have an unmon­i­tored account send­ing out emails, but almost every auto­mated or unmon­i­tored account mes­sage includes an email address you CAN respond to. What are you say­ing about your­self and your com­pany when you write per­sonal late notices to your ten­ants and then strongly instruct them not to reply? Don’t you care if I have ques­tions about why you think we owe you this money?

To me this screams, “We have no idea what we are doing or how to use sim­ple tech­nolo­gies such as email.” It also con­tin­ues to reen­force what I’ve thought for months about Pavil­ion Prop­er­ties- they don’t care about their ten­ants, they are incom­pe­tent when it comes to book­keep­ing, and they are going to need a major over­haul in how they do busi­ness in the very near future.

How nice would it be as a ten­ant to only get an email when I owed money and not when one of my room­mates does? How nice would it be if @mahoffma12 knew how to use his Twit­ter account so I didn’t have to not email him with ques­tions like “Who owes that money?” What if PavProp’s Face­book page could help me find sub­leasers for the sum­mer? These aren’t hard things to do even for a novice com­puter user.

Want to get more out of technology?

  • If you want your call returned, leave a voicemail
  • Shar­ing infor­ma­tion is great! Do it cor­rectly and you’ll share more than a silly YouTube video
  • If you con­tact me through a medium like email, expect me to respond with the same medium. That’s what the reply but­ton does.

Start using these sim­ple tools cor­rectly and you’ll see what all the fuss is about. Twit­ter isn’t on the news every night because it’s solely mun­dane details of people’s day to day lives. Face­book doesn’t have 175 mil­lion users because col­lege kids love it. Email didn’t become a word in the dic­tio­nary because it’s inef­fi­cient. Voice­mail didn’t earn Scott Jones a bil­lion dol­lars as a nov­elty item.

These are new ways to com­mu­ni­cate that make it eas­ier for peo­ple to con­nect and share. I’d even go so far as to say it’s improv­ing the qual­ity of (my) life so get on board and stop embar­rass­ing yourself!