If you want to get a feel for how rapidly email is becoming one of our most popular forms of communication, just ask the United States Post Office.
According to a survey conducted last year, the number of pieces of electronic mail sent in 1999 will already outnumber the postal mail sent by a factor of as much as 1,000 to 1, with email messages numbering in the trillions.
Yet if this is the trend, how interesting that so many of the people I talk to describe the actual email they receive in terms ranging from "impersonal" all the way to "obnoxious."
If email is one of our most efficient and useful forms of communication, it also seems to be among the most dysfunctional.
Leave aside, for the moment, the whole issue of email advertising. No, I'm talking about all the rest of the mail. Bluntly put, something about email seems capable of transforming even the most normal, rational person into — let's face it — a jerk.
Case in point: I've come to expect a certain amount of criticism of my columns on SF Gate, as well as intelligent and often very enlightening feedback. But to be sure, no matter if I'm writing about Microsoft monopolies or the price of floppy disks in China, I can also count on at least one person to write in raving as though I've burned their flag. "Don't like Windows? Yeah, well you're ugly, too." It's just par for the course.
The curious thing about it is that if I care to send a reply — assuming I choose my words carefully — in most cases, I'll receive back the standard response. "Sorry about that," they'll say. "I still don't really agree with you, but your column was OK I guess — I was just having a really bad day."
Stuff like that cracks me up. By "email logic," the next time I'm in a bad mood and someone cuts me off on the highway, I'd be perfectly justified in finding their number in the phone book and leaving death threats on their answering machine. After all, I was having a "really bad day."
The analogy to driving seems an apt one, since what happens when an average person is turned loose online seems remarkably like what happens when many folks get behind the wheel of a car.
Maybe you know the feeling. When you're on the road, everyone else is driving too slowly. Everyone — except you — swerved too sharply, or merged too closely. When you're driving, everyone else is an idiot.
So, too, with email. We've probably all been guilty of the email "Mr. Hyde Syndrome" at one point or another, or fired off an unprovoked "flame" or two. But what gives here? Most people don't act this way when they speak in person, or over the telephone. What is it about email that inspires such exaggerated behavior?
To get to the heart of the problem, one needs to look at the nature of the medium itself. The Internet has been widely hailed as being a great leveler. By appearances, any email address is as good as another, and whether you're a CEO or a mail-room clerk your email is likely to arrive at its destination just as quickly. While these are good things, email's speed and faceless nature can also be its greatest weaknesses.
True, email is fast. If all's well along the way, a message sent is likely to arrive at its destination seconds later. There's no more waiting 'til morning to drop the letter off at the Post Office; no more re-reading it before I slip it into the envelope. I push the button, and off it goes. Once done, there's no turning back — even if by the next morning I've already thought better of my comments. It's hit and run.
A deeper problem with email's expediency is that it fosters the relaxed feeling of being in a conversation, when in reality each message is a monologue. What to me might have seemed like an offhand comment, to the receiver might sound like a raving diatribe.
It may, in fact, be a raving diatribe — but whereas in regular conversation I could be interrupted to hear the other person's point of view; in email my ranting might not even be received until days later. Email only feels like a dialogue. By the time the response arrives, I might have forgotten what the argument was even about.
Nonetheless, electronic messaging lends a feeling of immediacy, of a need for a quick turnaround. In our haste, it's easy to disregard the demanding task of crafting effective correspondence. So long as we feel we've made our point, that's enough. We tend to ignore how easy it can be to "blow it."
This tendency becomes even more exacerbated in correspondence between strangers. If I don't know the person I'm writing to, so what if I sounded a little harsh? After all, short of a ransom note pasted together from newspaper clippings and wrapped around a brick, there's probably never been a form of communication more anonymous than email.
In the same way that being in our cars insulates us from contact with the other drivers on the road, email can depersonalize us even as it connects us. There might be a name attached to a message I receive, but it's just as likely it will be some fanciful pseudonym, like "DethLord" or "Kat65."
Ultimately, the return address on an email is as meaningless to me as the license plate on the car that cut me off. I can blast my horn at them but, by the time they give me the finger, they're already speeding down the off ramp — on to another email message or a different website. We never get to make eye contact, or judge each other's tone of voice to gauge our real feelings or attitudes.
But though the statistics on email usage say we're likely to encounter these problems more and more, email doesn't really represent a new trend — more a case of "everything old is new again." The art of correspondence, thought by many to be lost with the advent of the telephone, is alive and well in the late 20th Century. It's just that many of its practitioners haven't yet realized they've taken up the hobby.
By the same token, email isn't about to spell the death of communication. On the contrary, it's just making more of us writers. Understanding the meanings of words, as well as communicating effectively through written language, are skills that were practiced by all the authors, statesmen, and other great letter-writers of the last century. For today's email correspondents, re-learning these skills simply requires paying attention.
As we learn, the flame mail and miscommunication that have been the growing pains of the email explosion are sure to fall away. If you need proof, try an experiment: Maybe you have a comment to make about what I've written here, and maybe you were about to send me an email about it. Now you're a writer, too. We already have something in common — and personally, I couldn't be happier. I love to read.
So, go ahead. What was it you were going to say?
