tl;dr: If you want to tell me something, send an email.
This isn’t a best-practice or an admonishment. Everyone uses the internet differently and that’s great. But if you want to know how best to get in touch with me in 2016, this is what I’m biased towards.
Email is fucking great. It survived the spam wars and is still the best open and free (in all senses) direct communication protocol. You can email me at pete@peteashton.com (or my old gmail address) and I’ll get it. When I’ll respond to it depends on what you send.
A simple question or request that can easily be answered in a few minutes will usually be dealt with as soon as I get it. I love one paragraph emails. They’re my favourite kind.
More complex emails that require more time will be put off until I have time to deal with them. If they’re part of a current project or job then that’ll be soon, especially if you’re offering me something awesome. In general I like to clear these within the day, if I’m not tied up with a job.
If they’re not the above then it’ll depend on how much time I have, and that varies tremendously. If it’s been something like a week and you haven’t heard back from me, please do kick me up the arse. Your email is probably flagged and on the todo list but it’s worth checking.
My phone number is on the internet, mostly for Photo School business, which is tacitly giving you permission to call it. I’d rather you didn’t unless it’s urgent or something that really needs a conversation, because phone calls are not recorded and can’t be searched for later. If you need to give me information, please email it. Or text.
Text messages are great. Not as awesome as email but pretty darn good. You can consider text messages to be the equivalent of DMing me, if you like, because there’s a good chance you can’t DM me.
I don’t use Twitter socially. A while back I stopped following most of my friends and just follow people related to my work. Some of these are friends, of course, but I follow them for work reasons. In fact, if they stray away from work too much I’ll unfollow them. Twitter is an information gathering tool, keeping me connected to the people doing important work in my field.
I don’t use DMs if I can help it because they live in Twitter and can’t be searched easily. This is why I have DMs switched off. I don’t want my conversations stuck in that silo. Please email or text me.
No, I’m not on Facebook. I closed my account last year and haven’t missed it one bit. If you find Facebook useful and effective in some way then that’s great. I didn’t and that’s fine.
All other networks are simply tools. I’m not part of the Vimeo “community”. I use Vimeo to host my videos.
Instagram is the only exception. It’s the only social network I can stand to be social on. It probably only has a couple of years left before it succumbs to awfulness but for now it’s quite pleasant.
And that’s about it. Email, like God intended.
