Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] E-Mail Is Easy to Write (and to Misread)

["Vern Green" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Describes some of the disagreements on MLUG

On 10/10/07, Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:

Something to consider...


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/jobs/07pre.html

N.Y. Times
October 7, 2007

Preoccupations

E-Mail Is Easy to Write (and to Misread)

By DANIEL GOLEMAN

AS I was in the final throes of getting my most recent book into print, an
employee at the publishing company sent me an e-mail message that stopped
me in my tracks.

I had met her just once, at a meeting. We were having an e-mail exchange
about some crucial detail involving publishing rights, which I thought was
being worked out well. Then she wrote: "It's difficult to have this
conversation by e-mail. I sound strident and you sound exasperated."

At first I was surprised to hear I had sounded exasperated. But once she
identified this snag in our communications, I realized that something had
really been off. So we had a phone call that cleared everything up in a
few minutes, ending on a friendly note.

The advantage of a phone call or a drop-by over e-mail is clearly greatest
when there is trouble at hand. But there are ways in which e-mail may
subtly encourage such trouble in the first place.

This is becoming more apparent with the emergence of social neuroscience,
the study of what happens in the brains of people as they interact. New
findings have uncovered a design flaw at the interface where the brain
encounters a computer screen: there are no online channels for the
multiple signals the brain uses to calibrate emotions.

Face-to-face interaction, by contrast, is information-rich. We interpret
what people say to us not only from their tone and facial expressions, but
also from their body language and pacing, as well as their synchronization
with what we do and say.

Most crucially, the brain's social circuitry mimics in our neurons what's
happening in the other person's brain, keeping us on the same wavelength
emotionally. This neural dance creates an instant rapport that arises from
an enormous number of parallel information processors, all working
instantaneously and out of our awareness.

In contrast to a phone call or talking in person, e-mail can be
emotionally impoverished when it comes to nonverbal messages that add
nuance and valence to our words. The typed words are denuded of the rich
emotional context we convey in person or over the phone.

E-mail, of course, has a multitude of virtues: it's quick and convenient,
democratizes access and lets us stay in touch with loads of people we
could never see or call. It enables us to accomplish huge amounts of work
together.

Still, if we rely solely on e-mail at work, the absence of a channel for
the brain's emotional circuitry carries risks. In an article to be
published next year in the Academy of Management Review, Kristin Byron, an
assistant professor of management at Syracuse University's Whitman School
of Management, finds that e-mail generally increases the likelihood of
conflict and miscommunication.

One reason for this is that we tend to misinterpret positive e-mail
messages as more neutral, and neutral ones as more negative, than the
sender intended. Even jokes are rated as less funny by recipients than by
senders.

We fail to realize this largely because of egocentricity, according to a
2005 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Sitting
alone in a cubicle or basement writing e-mail, the sender internally
"hears" emotional overtones, though none of these cues will be sensed by
the recipient.

When we talk, my brain's social radar picks up that hint of stridency in
your voice and automatically lowers my own tone of exasperation, all in
the service of working things out. But when we send e-mail, there's little
to nothing by way of emotional valence to pick up.  E-mail lacks those
channels for the implicit meta-messages that, in a conversation, provide
its positive or negative spin.

On the upside, the familiarity that develops between sender and receiver
can help to reduce these problems, according to findings by Joseph
Walther, a professor of communication and telecommunication at Michigan
State University. People who know each other well, it turns out, are less
likely to have these misunderstandings online.

These quirks of cyberpsychology are familiar to Clay Shirky, an adjunct
professor in New York University's interactive telecommunications program.
His expertise is social computing -- software programs through which
multiple users interact, ranging from Facebook to Listservs and chat rooms
to e-mail. I asked Professor Shirky what all of this might imply for the
multitudes of people who work with others by e-mail.

"When you communicate with a group you only know through electronic
channels, it's like having functional Asperger's Syndrome -- you are very
logical and rational, but emotionally brittle," Professor Shirky said.

"I'm part of a far-flung distributed network that at one point was
designing a piece of software for sharing medical data; we worked mostly
by conference calls and e-mail, and it was going nowhere. So we finally
said we'd all fly to Boston and get together for two days, just sit in a
room and hash it out."

During that meeting, the team got an enormous amount of work done. And,
Professor Shirky recalls, "because the synchronization by e-mail was so
much better after the face-to-face piece, we actually hit the launch
date."

He proposes that work groups whose members are widely dispersed but need
to have high levels of coordination -- say, a computer security team
protecting a global bank -- do not have to assemble everyone in one room
to reap the same benefit. Instead, he suggests a "banyan model," after the
Asian tree that puts down roots from its branches.

In this approach, he said, "you put down little roots of face-to-face
contact everywhere, to strategically augment electronic communications."

Professor Shirky advised the I.T. head of a global bank to gather together
one representative from disparate cities for a day or two and complete
tasks. That way, when the security group in Singapore gets e-mail from the
security people in London, someone will be more likely to know the sender,
and sense how to read the information with less risk of misconstruing or
discounting it.

CONSIDER, too, the "e-mail the guy down the hall" effect: as the use of
e-mail increases in an organization, the overall volume of other kinds of
communication drops -- particularly routine friendly greetings. But
lacking these seemingly innocuous interactions, people feel more
disconnected from co-workers. This was noted in an article in
Organizational Science almost a decade ago, just as e-mail was starting to
surge. Saying "Hi," it turns out, really does matter; it's social glue.

As Professor Shirky puts it, "social software" like e-mail "is not better
than face-to-face contact; it's only better than nothing."

  ---

Daniel Goleman is the author of "Social Intelligence: The New Science of
Human Relationships" (Bantam). E-mail: EMAIL:PROTECTED.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

_______________________________________________
discussion mailing list
EMAIL:PROTECTED
http://mlug.missouri.edu/mailman/listinfo/discussion

-- 
Thanks
F Vernon Green 
_______________________________________________
discussion mailing list
EMAIL:PROTECTED
http://mlug.missouri.edu/mailman/listinfo/discussion