Labor saving and labor making of value in online congratulatory messages

Abstract

Social reminder interfaces on social networking sites (SNSs), such as the Facebook birthday reminder, make sending a congratulatory message easier than ever. However, the lower cost in time and effort can also devalue a simple message, and one-click congratulations may be criticized as impersonal. Nevertheless, they are still widely used. In this paper, we investigate how people find value in short congratulatory birthday messages on Facebook despite the criticism. We conducted interviews with 17 participants with the aid of a reflective prompting tool developed to aggregate participants’ previous birthday posts. Participants found the most value in personalized birthday posts, posts for reconnecting with dormant ties, and in the presentation of public affirmation posts for their imagined audience. We use signaling theory to interpret our findings and explain how a social reminder interface that lowers the cost in time for sending congratulatory messages can be both beneficial and problematic.