Evite and email as a way to create, enhance and sustain social relationships?

o my gosh!!! I haven't blogged for a month! Uh oh, there goes my marks. Can't seem to think of something good to write though, but I guess I'll try to do the best I can.

...noooo!!! i typed so much and there was an 'internal error' and now everything's gone except the line above!!! nooooo!!!! yes..that is something I dislike about writing on webpages, if something goes wrong, nothing is saved/backed up so I lose everything..v____v

ok...time to remember what i wrote and rewrite everything...v___V

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As I re-read previous lecture notes for the midterm, I noticed something interesting: "The role of e-mail in creating, enhancing, and sustaining social relationships and networks is probably obvious to you." (slide 51 from week 1) Evite and email are both ways to invite someone to an event, and with both methods, an organizer would typically send one message to all invitees (someone invited to an event) at once. Especially when there are many people invited, each invitee will most likely not receive a personal message. For the purpose of this blog, let us suppose that Evite and email are equivalent in the sense that one message is sent to all invitees for both methods.

So, does Evite create, enhance, and sustain social relationships?

An invitee who does not know the event organizer well will most likely feel special that he/she is invited to a party. This is a good way to start and enhance a social relationship. However, does it also sustain it?

For assignment #2, my partner and I found an interested article (www.ostrichink.com/june2003/evite.html) written by Brad Butler. Brad explains he invited his friend to his birthday party, but his friend denies receiving the Evite, which is why he has not responded. From an organizer's view of the Evite, he/she can see exactly when an invitee opened the Evite, and sure enough, Brad's friend has viewed the Evite. After knowing his friend lied to him, Brad quickly moved his friend's name from the "Not Yet Responded" list to the "Not Really Invited but Wanted You to Know I’m Throwing a Party and You Can’t Come" list. This example shows how Evite does not sustain a social relationship.

You might be thinking…Evite has a special function that shows when invitees view an invitation. Email does not have that...but it does. Microsoft Outlook has a function, which sends the sender a notification when the receiver receives a message.

Although this example may show that Evite does not sustain social relationships, it may be an exception to the case. Despite all of the negative points mentioned in the previous post, and this situation where it does not sustain relationships, I still enjoy using Evite. For me, it is a convenient way to organize responses when putting together an event, but also a way to find out what other invitees respond, where other methods may not allow me to do so.