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| The link between us |
November 5, 2001 |
By Grace Casselman
Set against the historical backdrop of human communication, e-mail is but a blip in the timeline. Yet it has altered not only the method but also the nature of human relationships.
Surely not, you say. After all, you’ve still got a few friends and family members who aren’t hooked up. But be honest with yourself: aren’t they rather inconvenient?
E-mail is an attractive form of communication because it’s both immediate and asynchronous. It gives us a quick and easy way to transmit data without enduring time-consuming voice conversations. And we can send off a query whenever it occurs to us, while telephones are still hamstrung by inconvenient social conventions such as not ringing up one’s employees at 3 a.m.
And even in its short life, e-mail has matured beyond simply a straightforward information exchange medium. Take Laura Mergelas’s experience as an example. The public relations professional in Toronto doubts she’d be married to her husband if it weren’t for the electronic links that helped develop their relationship early on.
Though they didn’t meet through a cyber chat line, they did find it easier to express themselves electronically at first. “We had known each other for three years as friends but we never really talked at a personal level until we started to exchange e-mail,” said Mergelas. “It opened the channels of communication. I’m convinced if we hadn’t communicated by e-mail, it wouldn’t have gone as it did. E-mail allows quiet or shy people to have their space.”
Change for good?
But not everyone believes communication has been enhanced by electronic media.
“It’s easier to sleep in a hammock full of cats than it is to hold meaningful and civilized conversations via e-mail,” said Peter de Jager, editor of the electronic newsletter Managing Change & Technology (http://www.technobility.com). Then again, he admits that without an e-mail distribution system it would cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to produce and distribute his newsletter in hard copy format to 4,600 monthly and 800 daily subscribers.
But why does he feel e-mail conversations lack meaning? He explains via e-mail: “Notes are terse. Quality is degraded. Ambiguity increases. Meaning is lost.”
A typical e-mail message today-be it professional or personal-very rarely measures up to yesterday’s letter. Not only are e-mails shorter and less formal, they display a distinct lack of concern with grammar, capitalization, spelling and even punctuation. “how r u?” write today’s e-mail users, who often convey underlying sentiment with emoticons. The cute, little sideways glances :>) are acceptable for communicating emotion in personal e-mail, but not in business situations.
“Because you are dashing off an e-mail, punctuation has become secondary to speed,” e-mails Jeff Wacker, futurist for EDS in Plano,Tex. “In the past, emotion was conveyed through words, not through side-glances.”
Sean Carruthers, a journalist in Toronto, puts it more bluntly in his e-mail: “When people used to send a hard letter through the post, they would pay serious attention to their own coherency, the usefulness of the information and the spelling, grammar, punctuation and capitalization in the text. Because e-mail is INSTANT (or so it seems), people now feel compelled to fire back a reply ASQUICKLYASHUMANLYPOSSIBLE and to hell with the subtleties of language.”
Driving understanding
While some of us may find this trend alarming, many strike a laissez-faire pose. Tom Keenan, dean of continuing education at the University of Calgary, comments via e-mail while at work in Bogota, Colombia: “We are seeing more spelling and grammar errors but it probably doesn’t matter much... since the point of communication is understanding.
“I am personally suspicious of e-mails that are too perfect. I think they may represent very tediously massaged worked-over verbiage. Real raw streaming email, with all its warts, is closer to how people think and perhaps to the truth. I think we wear our hearts on our sleeves more in e-mail.”
Robert Thompson, a teacher in Timmins, Ont., explains his e-mail style: “I tend to use three dots to separate my thoughts instead of traditional punctuation...there is no crossover of this style to my longhand (yet), but I find it helpful for the way I
think and type.”
“The older generation (like me) insist on spelling and punctuation accuracy,” writes Bryon Dickie, area marketing manager for KPMG in Calgary. “The younger generation does not care as much as long as the message is understood and received-perhaps they have a point.”
“E-mail is an instant-response culture,” writes Joe Katzman, chief insight officer for Insight Interact, a Toronto consulting firm. “Replies via e-mail tend to be more terse, yes. They may not use caps. Can we get past all that?
“The bottom line is that e-mail has made written expression immediately relevant to a lot of people who wouldn’t otherwise have cared. If the English teachers of the world had banded together and hired Dr. Evil himself to come up with a global plot, they couldn’t have done a better job.”
Respond please
As e-mail morphs further into instant messaging through wireless devices, expect grammar, capitalization and punctuation to further surrender to terseness. Meanwhile, the speed of e-communications may be contributing to a growing sense of stress, particularly in the workplace.
“There’s an increased expectation level about deadlines,” Mergelas said. “You can only say your e-mail’s down for so long.” de Jager agreed. “There is increased pressure to answer immediately, when sometimes more thought is not only advisable, but necessary.”
And Wacker said the pace of communication has spilled out beyond e-mail. “The increased tempo of correspondence is consistent with the staccato pace of life-or perhaps is creating it. This effect tends to bleed over into other interactions. We speak in quicker, shorter sentences in hallway conversations. Our interactions at home become more clipped.”
E-mail itself changing the pace and rhythm of our lives? It does seem a little unlikely, but then, a cheap, instantaneous, worldwide messaging system would have seemed unlikely only a decade ago.
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