Evaluates e-mail critically from four perspectives.  Note: This is /not/ the full version.  The full version is available upon written request only

Fulda, Joseph S.

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The Worst Way (Not) to CommunicateJoseph S. FuldaPeople love e-mail (Rogers, 1996; Boudreaux, 19961), so much so that it has very nearly renderedwhat is now called snail-mail obsolete.  I differ.  As I remarked elsewhere, “I regard e-mail’s as ahybrid between the oral and the written in a complex of ways,” (Fulda, 2012: n. 2) withoutelaboration.  I now take that opportunity.  Put directly, e-mail combines the worst of the oral and thewritten, and since this was not so at its inception but is ever-increasingly so now and seems unlikelyto abate, I wish it were relegated to the dustbin of history.  As far as I’m concerned, its soleconstructive use in the here and now is to send attachments which are bona fide written materials,as well as broadcasts of things that neither require nor suggest a response.Probably the best way to make the case is by contrasting e-mail with its alternatives, face-to-facecommunication, telephone conversation, and postal mail.  We will consider, in each contrasted formof communication, a variety of perspectives, principally the potential for miscommunication (as thetitle of this essay, read inclusively, indicates) and ethical considerations.  Before beginning, I wantto emphasize that  people nowhere near each other’s so-called wavelength may never communicatewell and that people determined on doing wrong will do so no matter what the medium.  Themedium is not the message, but e-mail lends itself to all sorts of problems, unforeseen at itsinception, but by now perfectly obvious.  What is perhaps not obvious, and why I write this, is whye-mail lends itself to these problems.Face-to-face communication has, since time immemorial, been the normal mode of humancommunication–for good reasons.  By which I mean, not just the obvious reason, the priorinfeasibility of any other form of communication, but its practical and moral superiority.  Becausetwo people facing each other have the full range of visual and aural cues, rudeness, deception, andmiscommunication are far less likely–though crassness, artifice, and misunderstanding are all alwayspossible.  What makes miscommunication less likely is perhaps surprising; it is the commonlythought rude–but in fact often crucial–ability to interrupt, used judiciously, of course.  A trueconversation without any interruptions is much like a class without questions (and answers), a failureto engage.  Indeed, arguably, such a conversation is not a conversation properly so-called at all.The telephone ranks next.  It has aural cues, but no visual cues; there is the ability to interrupt, butit is more often considered rude, rather than natural, than in a true conversation.Next comes snail-mail.  Like e-mail, snail-mail has no cues and there is no possibility of interruption.An epistolary exchange is not a dialogue, but a series of monologues, just like e-mail, and it is farslower.  However, therein lies its superiority.  It takes far more time to compose a formal, writtenmissive, seal it, address it, and post it than it does to fire off some ephemeral e-mail–which aseveryone knows by now may not be ephemeral at all.  (In the law, e-discovery is a “hot topic.”)When something takes a good deal of time from conception to execution, the possibility of rudenessis reduced by the passage of time, as passions wane.  Likewise, as one revises for clarity and withcare, the possibility of miscommunication wanes: This does, of course, presuppose that one’s lettersare of the former sort, not mere e-mail’s sent by post.  To the extent that letter-writing has becomea “lost art,” then, this is no longer true.  Artifice may also be less likely, as one must sign, whichalthough it has no legal value has some sort of inner ethical value.  Likewise, when one writes aformal letter one is more aware that one has done something with the potential for permanence,notwithstanding that e-mail is, in fact, often just as permanent.  It is the awareness that matters, evenmore than the reality, in countering artifice.  It would be remiss of me not to mention, at least inpassing, that self-reported empirical research on the effect of technology on the production (theirword) of deception in social psychology gives very different findings (Hancock, et. al., 2004).   I willjust say here that I am thoroughly unconvinced, although a full discussion of why is not appropriatein this space. The final point I wish to make concerns privacy.  One can always surreptitiously tape anything, butone doing so is fully aware that he is violating social norms, basic ethical principles, and may beviolating the criminal law.  With e-mail, however, not only is the law murky, but it is just so easyto forward something to someone other than the recipient without permission–too easy.  Of course,this violates the original sender’s copyright, too.  It is simply a canard that a copyright notice isrequired–although it used to be so, long, long ago.  We live in an age when copyright and privacyrights alike are largely held in contempt; people largely have few compunctions about stealingintellectual property, violating authors’ moral rights, or spilling other people’s secrets withoutexcellent reasons.  Journalism and the archival “profession,” in fact, thrive on these wrongs.I wish it were not necessary to censor anyone or anything, including the Internet, yet even the mostliberal countries are increasingly moving in that direction.  The number of commentators decryingthese moves is vast, but why doesn’t anyone ask why this is happening?  Could it just possibly bethat collectively we are so massively abusing our rights that governments worldwide, including thosenot by any means considered oppressive by history’s standards, feel that they simply have no choicebut to step in?  Could it be that we free citizens must look in the mirror for the answer to the movetoward Internet censorship?  An uncomfortable but enormously timely and powerful question.It is ironic that along with multi-tasking (an inapt term borrowed from computing, which does notmesh with our human brains, and simply leads to distraction and loss of focus and concentration)e-mail has been bequeathed to the twenty-first century by the twentieth in the name of efficiency(taken as speed), when the normal response to an e-mail is a follow-up e-mail, on and on. A recentNew York Enterprise Report issue cites a 2012 study that “the average ‘knowledge’ employee gets147 emails a day and spend 28% of her time at the office on email....” (Levin, 2013).  Frankly, Idoubt this figure; it is probably higher, and probably also excludes personal e-mail’s read oncompany time, which is normally blamed on employees without considering that they have learnedthis practice from the company’s own business policies!All this calls to mind Irving Babbit’s (124: 3-4) remark, “[W]e have the type of man who deemshimself progressive and is yet pursuing power and speed for their own sake, the man who does notcare where he is going, as some one has put it, provided only he can go there faster and faster.”Note1. In fairness to Rogers and Boudreaux, neither of them would probably be as enthusiastic today; in1996, most of what is said here did not apply.  E-mail was still at its inception, although it hadprecursors available only to the few through ARPA, now DARPA, and in Europe, through the far-more-widespread Minitel.  Also, Boudreaux’ piece is largely about what the Internet cannot do; Irefer mainly to his comment on p. 720, “As a forum for conversation, the Internet is dazzling.” Indeed, in 1996, it was.  Alas, it is so no longer.ReferencesIrving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership (Boston and New York:  Houghton Mifflin Company,1924).Boudreaux, Donald J. (1996).  Salvation through the Internet?, The Freeman, 46: 719-720.Fulda, Joseph S. (2012, Spring).  Written for the moment, Journal of Information Ethics, 21: 21-26.Hancock, Jeffrey T., Thom-Santelli, Jennifer, and Ritchie, Thompson (2004, April 24-29). Deception and design: The impact of communication technology on lying behavior, Proceedings ofthe (2004 Computer-Human Interaction) Conference on Human Factors in Computing  Systems, 6:129-134.Levin, Robert. (2013, July/August). A more productive company, New York Enterprise Report10(5):4.Rogers, A.M. (1996). Who put the e in e-mail?, The Freeman, 46: 616-617.

The Worst Way (Not) to Communicate

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The Worst Way (Not) to Communicate

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