Communicating with E-mail, IM, and Social Networks

Abstract

This chapter is about keeping in touch and connecting with friends, family, colleagues, and services. It is about using programs and the Internet to share your thoughts, interests, and other things about your life. It is about using your computer to do things you used to do, or never could do, with the telephone and postal (snail) mail. It really is amazing how far we’ve come from smoke signals, messengers running on foot or on horseback in relays to cover vast distances, or even messages in bottle tossed in the sea. Now we can talk to and see each other instantly, across the world. The world is the same size, yet with these richer, more direct, and quicker forms of communication it seems smaller and more accessible. E-mail has been around much longer than instant messaging and is still the backbone of one-to-one electronic communication in business, large organizations, government, and educational institutions. Social networks are relatively new and build upon a foundation of web sites and both e-mail and instant messaging. This chapter will build upon these communication methods in the same order, telling you about using: E-mail programs to send and receive messages on your own schedule. You don’t have to be on the Internet with somebody at the same time as they are in order to communicate with them. Instant Messaging (IM) or Chat programs to instantly send and receive messages, with one or many friends when both of you are online at the same time. Social Networks to share your thoughts, pictures, or whatever you want with a few or many friends, or the world.