Livre d'Or

I almost don't do social text messages at all, for me texts are purely for logistics. I mean, texts to my husband sometimes acquire expressions of affection or snippets about our days, but if we didn't also keep in touch with visits, phone-calls and emails I probably wouldn't feel like writing those kinds of texts.

I do have one friend who is in a place of finding the internet a source of misery and awful procrastination, so she's avoiding social media. And in theory we're supposed to speak on the phone but we're both junior academics with no time at all and in different time zones to boot, so it doesn't really work. So when she last visited she persuaded me to install an international text-messaging app, and now we do have a few exchanges of texts every couple of weeks, which is helping a bit. So you're right, maybe I should have included texts.

Yes, I am concerned about UK surveillance as well as American, you're right to point that out. To some limited extent European privacy laws do give us a bit of protection if our data is held by European rather than American companies. But I worry about things like the recent, infamous porn trial. On the one hand, if someone in power really wanted to embarrass me and fuck up my life, keeping my conversations away from Google and Facebook wouldn't help. But on the other, I have sent and received images at least as graphic as the ones that ended up in that case, and ok, Peacock was found entirely innocent of any criminal activity but the allegations were already really damaging to him.

Good point that if you feel obliged to be thoughtful (and possibly lengthy), you're less likely to be able to produce content at all. Maybe I should get over my 90s-formed prejudices of what social email is supposed to be like. I think my DW top posts are fairly thoughtful, but my DW comments can be pretty casual.