|
The decline of e-mail civility
From personal communication tool to form-letter-spitter
By: Bruce Krever
 Remember how excited you were when you first started using e-mail? It seemed almost magical.
You could send a letter to a friend halfway around the world and get a response within hours. You could get in touch with family you hadn't seen in years and swap photos. University students could e-mail their professors when they had a problem, instead of booking an appointment at an inconvenient time. Business contacts could keep in touch without playing telephone tag. And all this without expensive postage, long distance charges, or a big investment of time.
But for all its ubiquity, has e-mail fulfilled its early promise? Has it made communication easier and more fun? Has it reduced our feelings of isolation and alienation? Has it revived the long-lost art of letter writing?
Twenty years ago, few of us imagined being able to buy a consumer product and then contact the actual guy who created that product if we had any problems or questions about its functions. Well, now we can. The computer world sure is a weird and wonderful place!
 |
|
Employees are being asked to do more and more for less pay. Some people complain that they often lose several hours in a single day just reading and responding to e-mail. |
Shareware, freeware, and e-mail have created the illusion that everyone's your buddy. Hey, download this great free program, and if you have any problems with it, just e-mail the author; he'll be happy to help you.
I've sent numerous queries to a guy who writes and gives away a great little chess database program. He usually gets back to me right away, answers all my questions, and even thanks me for my detailed bug reports. Could life get any better?
Sadly, this kind of personal and prompt attention seems to be the exception, not the rule. There's a darker side to the world of e-mail. Civility seems to be going out the window. Because it's so fast and easy to use, people are now getting deluged with e-mail.
|
|
A friend of mine told me he actually gets frightened and turns off his computer if he sees more than three or four new e-mail messages downloading |
Worker overload is one of the leading causes of stress in the contemporary office, as employees are expected to do more work for less pay. Some people complain that they often lose several hours in a single day just reading and responding to e-mail. As a result, people are prioritizing ruthlessly, and e-mail civility isn't making the final cut. Three recent experiences confirmed my theory.
A while back I wrote to the customer service department of a commercial software company to find out when the Macintosh release of their new chess program would be available. They told me the date. A few weeks after that date passed and no software was available, I wrote again. They told me the new date. It passed too, without incident.
This cycle repeated itself one more time. At no point did the customer service representative mention what was causing the delay. The next time I asked what was going on, they simply sent me a form letter giving me their Web address and telling me to visit their site. I did. There was no mention on the site of when the product would be released. In fact, there was no mention of the Macintosh version of the product at all.
I wrote back, expressing some surprise that their customer service was so poor. Given the small size of the Mac market, I explained, I would have thought that someone eagerly wanting to fork over cash for a new Mac product would have been treated rather better. I explained that my experience didn't make me hopeful that if I bought the product and experienced any difficulty with it, their customer service would be any better. They responded to this letter with another form letter thanking me for my interest in the company. Hello? Is anybody even reading my e-mails?
One of the editors I correspond with at Straight Goods has recently begun answering my letters with a series of digital grunts. On a good day. Sort of like a somewhat rude, urbanized version of Tarzan. Not that she can't write, and write well; she just has no time for it.
A friend of mine moved out of town a few years ago. I thought we'd keep in touch via e-mail. But, as he explained to me when I complained about his infrequent correspondence, when he turns on his computer and downloads his e-mail, if he sees more than 3 or 4 messages come in, he gets frightened and turns off his computer.
So everyone's overworked and stressed out, and few people have the time to write long, frequent, friendly, helpful, or even just plain clear letters.
But there's more than that to the decline in e-mail civility. I think the other part of the equation is tied to two seductive attributes of the computer itself: speed and the ease of editing.
There's an implicit sense of immediacy in the computer world. You can download software in minutes, send an e-mail in the blink of an eye and receive a reply a few minutes later.
|
|
No one has time to read over what they've written and edit for coherence, never mind style. They don't even seem to have the time to run the spell-checker. The result? Stream-of- consciousness blather, garbled and misspelled sentence fragments, and digital throat-clearings. |
We're so used to everything happening immediately that it seems like torture waiting more than 20 seconds for our computers to load a Web page. Programmers have even written software programs that speed up the startup time of our computers. Yet writing a letter that's thoughtful or entertaining, or at least intelligible, takes time. That can't be good.
Word processing programs have also lured people into a false sense of security. Go ahead, spit out your raw ideas, do a big brain-dump, you can always fix it up later. And it's true, you can. But few people do.
A few years ago, students used to write "rough copies" of essays by hand, rework them several times, and then write or type a "good copy" (thank you, Liquid Paper). But word processing programs changed all that. No one has time to read over what they've written and edit for coherence, never mind style. They don't even seem to have the time to run the spell-checker. The result? Stream-of-consciousness blather, garbled and misspelled sentence fragments, and digital throat-clearings.
So is e-mail more of a bane than a boon? Maybe not.
Maybe the problem isn't with the technology but with us. People have to want to communicate. People have to decide that communicating, and communicating well, is something that's both worthwhile and enjoyable.
Until we do, no matter how many new communication technologies we create, the long-lost art of letter writing will still remain to be found.
Bruce Krever, former jazz musician, teacher, and copy editor, lives in Toronto and is now working as a layout artist, production person, and Macintosh technical support person for a publishing services company. He also enjoys learning about - and trying to play - chess.
Get More/Do More
Have you noticed a general decline in e-mail civility recently?
 Straight Goods wants your opinion
If you can spare the time, you can e-mail Bruce at krever@straightgoods.com.
Other articles from the Krever chronicles
[ Front Page ]
|
