E-mail!

E-mail is a phenomenon believed by many to be the revenge of pen and paper on the technology that I changing our world. Today e-mails are used in every setting, whether it be between family members who are many miles apart, bosses instructing their employees sitting two offices away, or businesses informing the general public of their deals and sales for the next month. Robert Kuttner, author of The Other Side of E-mail, states that “like all new media, e-mail has a dark side”. He argues that e-mail is a thief of time because now, on top of everything else we have to do, we also feel the overwhelming necessity of checking our e-mails and replying to every single one. The other big issue that Kuttner shares with many others about e-mail is the fact that it is affecting our communicative abilities. In her essay “Virtually Trustworthy”, Judith Donath explains that “we carry out social interactions with a large number of communicative behaviors that indicate our intensions, state of mind, communicative competency, and so on.” These nonverbal behaviors are completely eliminated when trying to communicate over e-mail. The reader has no chance to look at the writer’s facial expression, listen to their tone of voice, experience their body language, or make eye contact with them. These are all nonverbal cues that, as discussed in an earlier blog, are essential for us to have a successful communicative experience.
With nonverbal communication is that people do not realize how dependant they are on it. We take it for granted until one day, it does not match up with the verbal communication. In other words, if a person is telling you how happy they are about something, but their tone of voice is feeble and their arms are crossed with a frown on their face, we can easily interpret this as a sign that maybe they are trying to hide their true feelings. The issue with e-mail is that this ability, to look at them and see something different from what we hear, is taken away and we are now completely dependent on only words (not even verbal communication since we also cannot hear their tone or volume of their voice). Kuttner describes an instance in which he had a quarrel with a friend, merely because they were miscommunicating over e-mail. He states that “when talking to someone, you pay attention to tonality. And when you write a letter, you read it over a few times before sending it. But e-mail is tone-deaf and all too instant.”
The fact that e-mails forces this type of communication is problematic in that it will cause generations to change the way they communicate face-to-face. The convenience of typing a quick e-mail with no need to listen or stick around for the conversation that would normally follow what you send in an e-mail, will cause people to start walking away from face-to-face conversations without fully finishing the conversation. E-mails are also causing people to try and communicate without the essential tools of nonverbal and verbal communication. There is no way of substituting these tools for something else, and therefore, a future generation will not find an alternate way to still communicate effectively, but instead suffer and deal with many problems stemming from miscommunicating.