One of the great things about social media is the ability it gives us to share our thoughts and opinions with many people at once.
Have good news? Throw it up on Facebook and all your friends can know about it instantly. Got a cute photo of your kid or grandkid... or your dog? Share it with everyone on Facebook and Instagram.
Got an opinion about something in the news headlines? Send an email to dozens of your friends and business associates.
How great, right? But here's where I'm going to don my "grump" hat.
Sharing opinions via a mass email is ok, but NOT when the sender includes everyone's email address. Here's what often happens... and I'm sure this will sound familiar to you.
Joe sends out an email blast to four dozen people with cute dog pictures. Because of all the pix attached, the email is 8MB and almost fills my email Inbox, the same Inbox that I rely on for work-related messages. So I have to open it and, possibly, scroll down quickly to look at the pictures, and then delete the whole message. To be polite, I'll probably send areply email to Joe saying something like "How cute!"
But if the sender has included everyone's email address in the "Send to" box, here';s where the problem begins. Sally, who I don't know, sends Joe a note saying how cute the pictures are. But she hits "Reply to all" so I get an email from her. And then Bill sends a similar note, along with his own cute photos. And he too hits "Reply to all." There's back & forth with another dozen innocuous emails, almost all from people I don't really know.
The process has added a dozen emails to my Inbox, which already gets, on a typical workday, anywhere from 150 to 200 messages. So it means more stuff I have to open and delete.
That's frustrating enough, but it really gets bad during a political season. It's been especially bad this season, with people seemingly strongly polarized eitherred or blue. I rarely try to sway others to my way of thinking via email, but some people I know (and some I hardly know) think an email -- whether originated by them or forwarded by them -- will convince me that President Obama was born in Kenya or that all the troubles in the world today have been caused by the current Administration.
A friend recently included me in a mass email she sent encouraging support for Obama. She made the mistake of including all the email addresses in the "To" line. There was some back & forth -- all of it going to everyone on the list. Finally, when someone who disagreed with my friend sent an email that had to be more than 1,000 words long, I decided I'd had enough. I asked my friend's friend to please take me off her reply list. She did and she apologized.
But how much time and aggravation could be saved if people sharing by email would simply hide the mailing list as a bcc. Please.