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The Downside of Email

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Work Wednesday

A lot of people prefer to use email as a workplace communication tool. Many people will tell you it simplifies things, is quicker and doesn’t leave a lot of room for prolonged discussion or debate like phone calls or  face-to-face communication do.  While this may seem to be true, these things are actually some of the downsides of using email for work communication.

I’m not an overly enthusiastic fan of the phone as a means of communication. I have a tough time figuring out how to get off the phone with people who aren’t good at recognizing the signals that end a conversation and I find phone interviews a little difficult. In a face-to-face conversation, I find it a lot easier to follow the natural tangents and still come back to the original conversation or talking points.

I used to think email was a good compromise because it allowed me to ask what I wanted to ask or say what I wanted to say, read the other person’s response and then follow-up with my thoughts. More recently, I’ve realized there are some significant disadvantages for using email for work related communication. 

• Email is emotionless. That means recipients are more likely to ascribe their own emotions to the message. In fact, in an article discussing how emotion is communicated (or miscommunicated) via email, Kristin Byron, a professor at Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management, found that the inability to use nonverbal cues in email makes misinterpretation of the intended emotion much more likely. Recipients often interpret positive emails as neutral and neutral emails as having negative emotional connotations.

• People tend to drop the niceties in work emails. It’s very poor social etiquette to start a telephone or face-to-face conversation without a simple greeting or “How are you?” I’ve received a number of emails that jump right into “I need this from you” without even so much as a “Hi.” Even the emails I’ve sent that start out with some small talk sometimes seem stilted or as if I’m trying too hard to find a gentle way into a conversation.

• It’s not always easy to know when the conversation is over. I struggle with this and I’m sure others do too.  Once the meat of the discussion is complete, when do you stop the conversation? How many times do you have to email back a “thank you” before it’s too much?  What if somebody is expecting a response from you and you didn’t think it required one? This can easily lead to misunderstandings about your commitment to a project or whether you’re going to be a team player.

Ideally, face-to-face communication would be the best way to conduct business. Unfortunately, with global workplaces and a tremendous increase in telecommuting, that’s not always an option. There are a few thing you can do to help, though.

Identity is Messy

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Technology Tuesday

Another week goes by, another impetus for everyone to fret about identity online. In this case, as the New York Times puts it, " ‘Gay Girl in Damascus’ Blogger Admits to Writing Fiction Disguised as Fact." Turns out the gay Syrian blogger writing about oppressive conditions there was: not gay, not Syrian, and not there.

In a telephone interview with The Lede on Monday morning, Mr. MacMaster, who is currently in Turkey, said, “I sort of by accident… created something that had a lot more interest than I had ever possibly expected and then when I tried to shut it down it just kept getting bigger.” He explained that he had initially created Amina, his Arab lesbian character, as “a handle” he would use when he wanted to contribute comments to online discussions. His aim, he said was to use the character to present “a perspective that doesn’t often get heard on the Middle East and that was also a challenge for me, as somebody who has aspirations as a novelist, to write in a voice of a character who is absolutely not me.”

I was not following this blog but had heard some buzz about it, especially after an entry was posted asserting that "Amina" had been taken by Syrian security forces. From what I've been able to quickly piece together, Andy Carvin (the amazing @acarvin on Twitter - doing really innovative work as a senior strategist at NPR) was key to surfacing the truth. Here's one NPR story about it. You can scan his twitter stream for more links and conversation.

This isn't the first Internet pseudonym that got out of hand. In this case, even the U.S. State Department was involved. The most interesting post I've read about the whole thing so far (before the blogger's entry was revealed) was an exploration of pseudonymity and repression by Zeynep Tufeckci. A snippet:

In the Wake of the Tsunami

Sharing Saturday

I woke up my nine year old son with a bribe yesterday morning: "If you get up now, you'll get to see the tsunami hit Hawaii live."

Needless to say, my geography-loving boy scrambled out of bed and was downstairs in his footie pajamas faster than you can say "earthquake." Hawaii? Cool.

We turned on both the computer and the television to see where we would get the best live streaming video, and sat down with our Cheerios, waiting, somewhat nervously, for disaster. He even calculated the exact moment of impact based on what one reporter said was the expected timing of the wave.

As it turns out, the tsunami did not hit Hawaii as expected at that moment, and we instead packed up lunch and his backpack and head out to school before there was anything to watch live.  We did see some video footage of the earthquake hitting Japan from earlier in the morning, and the terrible clip of one town that got washed away by the tsunami there, but I have to admit, watching the devastation left in the wake of the disaster wasn't nearly as thrilling (but in a terrible, looming way) as waiting to see what would happen next.

It reminded me of sitting on the couch nursing this same child, nearly 10 years ago, and watching the Twin Towers and Pentagon smolder and the world as we know it change forever, live and right before my very eyes.

Three Quick Thoughts

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Technology Thursday

I'm traveling again, so I will just quickly share a few quick, unrelated sci/tech thoughts today.

First, the obvious. The iPad 2 has been announced, with the usual glitzy Apple fanfare. Which, yes, I get a kick out of - but let's be honest - it's a gadget. It's not actually magical. And like other companies who outsource manufacturing, there are issues. (See my post from last week about Mike Daisey's important work on labor conditions for those who build these beautiful devices.) Still, it is an impressive piece of design and engineering. And I will probably get one.

Second, I'm in Silicon Valley right now and yesterday I wandered into ... a Google store. Did you know there was such a thing? I did, but what I didn't know is that you can also buy Google-branded merchandise online. And in a mark of how much I've kind of ignored Droid phones, it took me several hours before I figured out that the reason there are lots of little robot toys in the Google store and scattered around the Google campus is because of the mascot. Android. Get it? Yeah. I can be slow sometimes.

Third, I was sad to see that Space Shuttle Discovery is on its last mission. It turns out I know a couple of people who were nearby in Florida to watch the launch in person. And, coincidentally, my husband was also in Florida on launch day and caught a glimpse of it - an orange smudge in the sky - from his hotel in the middle of the state.

I'm stuck in a meeting for the rest of the day and back on a plane tomorrow. Back with hopefully a more substantive entry next week - drop me a note if there's some technology topic I should address in this space.

Go See Mike Daisey's New Show

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Technology Thursday

Many of us love our gadgets. However, as with many first-world consumption patterns, they don't come free of guilt. There are ongoing questions and challenges regarding the environmental impact of manufacturing computers and electronic gadgetry. And there are also concerns about the sheer amount of energy required to power these wonderful Intarwebz and all the geegaws connected to them. There's a reason big companies like to place datacenters near rivers (hint: hydroelectric power).

So, while we can all feel a smidge of anxiety knowing that every Google search we do and every email we send kinda' sorta' maybe sends a little puff of carbon dioxide into an atmosphere, that, in the immortal words of engineer Montgomery Scott CANNA TAKE MUCH MORE OF THIS, CAP'n, another guilt-inducer is labor. Specifically, the labor practices used in the places that manufacture our pretty, pretty iPads.

Mike Daisey is an amazing monologuist, story teller, and solo performer. Last year I saw his show "The Last Cargo Cult" at Woolly Mammoth Theatre in D.C. and it was amazing. I have been remiss all these years in not seeing his earlier work. I also read the book he wrote about working at Amazon in the 90s called 21 Dog Years: A Cube Dweller's Tale. His most recent effort is a show called "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs." Here's a snippet of a review:

In this freewheeling theatrical essay, he doesn't just hold Apple CEO Steve Jobs' feet to the fire. He doesn't just question the morality of capitalism. He forces theatergoers to take a hard look at the glowing screens in their pockets and ask where they came from and at what cost.

Only a true believer, a man who fieldstrips his MacBook Pro down to its 43 components parts to unwind, could be this shocked and heartbroken to find that the gadgets he adores, those glossy pieces of electronic sculpture known as the iPad and the iPhone, might have been produced under brutal working conditions in China. Eager to investigate for himself, Daisey traveled to Shenzhen, a city of 14 million people crammed together under a "poisoned silver sky," at a time when workers were hurling themselves off the roof at Foxconn, one of Apple's key manufacturers.

Another, explaining why Apple Fanboys should see the show: (I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt this time and let's all assume Apple Fangirls should, too)