Only Contraria would think that email is a mixed blessing.
It is a blessing indeed. How else to exhort the little league team to show up at practices or tell a group when the meeting is? How else to transmit documents and images to keep the world turning ever faster? How else to communicate with relatives in Africa, or in case we don’t know if someone is in California or England?
But I have thought for a while and in the past few days have had a series of conversations suggesting that email may not be ideal in all situations. Two conversations arose from a single exchange between the office manager and one of the staff. Each came to me to complain about the tenor of the other in the email exchange. The matter was routine, or perhaps a little uncomfortable, and there was a certain lack of subtlety in the first email which elicited a sharp reply in the second. Both would have benefitted from some unknown feature of Outlook which could say “Are you sure you want to phrase that exactly that way?”, before the “send” is finalized. Both would have benefitted by having the conversation face to face.
Today’s conversation was with a young man who wants a vote from the City Council. He says he has done everything right because he has emailed his position to each of the councillors. The older people in the room are skeptical. The lobbyists say that they do provide information to councillors by email, but the “ask” is in person or at least by phone. People from some other generation believe that email has replaced the phone, but I think they are just uncomfortable with face to face encounters.
What we cannot do with email is gauge or evaluate a response, which makes email good for delivering pure information but bad for testing ideas or eliciting subtleties. In a sense I am troubled not by the failure of email to give information but by the inability to use “active listening” to the response. Email creates a form of barrier to communication which takes the listening part out of a conversation.
At the end of the day, I am a salesman. I can take orders by email, but would not get the orders if that were all I did.
It is a blessing indeed. How else to exhort the little league team to show up at practices or tell a group when the meeting is? How else to transmit documents and images to keep the world turning ever faster? How else to communicate with relatives in Africa, or in case we don’t know if someone is in California or England?
But I have thought for a while and in the past few days have had a series of conversations suggesting that email may not be ideal in all situations. Two conversations arose from a single exchange between the office manager and one of the staff. Each came to me to complain about the tenor of the other in the email exchange. The matter was routine, or perhaps a little uncomfortable, and there was a certain lack of subtlety in the first email which elicited a sharp reply in the second. Both would have benefitted from some unknown feature of Outlook which could say “Are you sure you want to phrase that exactly that way?”, before the “send” is finalized. Both would have benefitted by having the conversation face to face.
Today’s conversation was with a young man who wants a vote from the City Council. He says he has done everything right because he has emailed his position to each of the councillors. The older people in the room are skeptical. The lobbyists say that they do provide information to councillors by email, but the “ask” is in person or at least by phone. People from some other generation believe that email has replaced the phone, but I think they are just uncomfortable with face to face encounters.
What we cannot do with email is gauge or evaluate a response, which makes email good for delivering pure information but bad for testing ideas or eliciting subtleties. In a sense I am troubled not by the failure of email to give information but by the inability to use “active listening” to the response. Email creates a form of barrier to communication which takes the listening part out of a conversation.
At the end of the day, I am a salesman. I can take orders by email, but would not get the orders if that were all I did.
posted by Contraria | 7:57 PM
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