Merlin, can’t agree with you more. The one thing that I would say, as a minor point, is that having things in writing can be very powerful, and email can be a useful tool in that regard. If your supervisor and you (or your client and you, etc.) have a disagreement, having an old email/letter/piece of paper lying around makes those problems much easier to resolve.

I think people go way overboard on email, but I think that that piece is worth mentioning.

I couldn’t agree more. I advise anyone who will listen that they need to use email with care, as the rules of engagement via email are changing as we speak.

I would go further and say that no-one should ever use email to try to resolve an upset, communicate disapproval, give feedback and express anything other than the most positive feelings. These should be reversed exclusively for phone or face to face conversations.

Yet… people still try, making a mess of it. To overcome the unique combination of intimacy and distance takes superb writing skills that are only possessed by a handful… and of that number, few have the time one hand that is required to write great emails.

All good points, and I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with the “feedback” idea. Email, SMS, twitter - none of these have tangible automatic feedback to say “message received, read, and will be responded to within (x)”, or “message deleted as inappropriate”. Everyone communicating with you through these channels can think they’re the ONLY one communicating with you, and hence as you say, can invent their own expectations of an appropriate response.

Phonecalls and IM are different - instead of being point-to-point, they’re “face-to-face”. If I call and you don’t pick up, I know that message didn’t get through. If I leave a message, you can tell from my tone of voice how urgent it is. If I try again and get no response, that’s all feedback. Same with IM

Nothing stops me banging 20 emails an hour at you until you respond. I’ve had people do this before, and they genuinely don’t understand why they haven’t had a response yet.

Of course, blog responses also provide no feedback mechanism, and this reply is more about me working this stuff out in my own head than contributing much more than you’ve already said, so I’ll shut up now.

-J

I was talking with a group of 6 other pastors 35 and under about issues/conflicts/etc we had faced in our churches and without any effort on my part, EVERY ONE of their stories involved someone who was using email in some passive aggressive form that they had had to respond to as pastors.

I have had to tell our secretary and the head of our church board to STOP EMAILING EACH OTHER because they both have unfortunate”tone of voice” via email and each one cannot “read” the other person correctly.

My decision to leave my first church was prompted, in part, by “anonymous” email that I was getting through a webform on my personal website telling me I was wasting my time on this web stuff when I should have been spending all of my time on the church (I was only working about 12 hour days).

Funnily enough, the “anonymous” web form did tell me the IP address of the person who sent it, which traceroute’d back to a small company in town where one of my key volunteers worked.

He signed his email “mad@righteous-anger.com” so I setup Apache to automatically redirect connections from his IP address to www.righteous-anger.com (which was, at that time, a website for a hard rock band, IIRC) which led him to send me another anonymous email from a different computer/IP (I assume his home computer) telling me he was going to try to get me fired, which I replied-to at his regular email address, asking if he would like to get together and talk about it (he never did).

It is now my official work policy that if you raise an issue with me via email, I am going to respond on the phone, and I work hard not to give my work email address to anyone who does not need it for what it does well (one way distribution of information). Obviously this won’t work in every job, but I believe that that insanity (or at least rampant passive aggressiveness) email leads to is actively harmful in most churches.

Your idea elsewhere about turning off blog comments (and, I would add, group emails) after midnight would have avoided another messy situation where someone blurted out a rumor that he had heard and CC’d everyone related to the church in his email address book. Fortunately he didn’t use BCC so I knew who I had to go and talk to afterwards, but it took months to fix the damage he did saying something at home late at night all alone that he never would have said in the light of day, or would have said differently.

The worst I think is the email that originated from a BlackBerry/iPhone/Insert-email-attached-to-belt-device-here. Tone, thought, and even capitalization has a tendency to go out the window when its just the thumbs doing the talking.

On the plus side, at least those emails are generally short.

If the focus is on what someone needs to know rather than how it’s expressed, email will tend to be short. Without thematic focus, people writing email wind up just interfacing with their own thoughts, and the receipient is subjected to the sender’s inner monologue. Only on rare occasions do I write an email that’s more than five sentences.

It’s pretty obvious when an email is little more a person thinking out loud. As the sender and responder, you have the responsibility to frame the exchage with an emphasis on concision and signal over noise.

Open sentences with delimiting phrases like “The main point is” or “The three issues I want addressed are,” and so on. You’ll find that you receive the short and on-point style of email you send. It becomes the expectation.

Writing for Business was one of the most useful classes I had in undergrad. I returned to college in my early 20’s to finish up my degree, so I already had a few years of “business” under my belt. After each session of that class, unlike 95% of the others, I left equipped to, if I chose, take immediate action to better my role as an employee, entrepreneur and even husband.

The written word is one of the most beautiful and powerful forms of communication, with thousands of years of rich, shaping influence on who we are as humans. With such a low communication barrier, e-mail makes it easy to forget the influence words have.

“The 0.001 Challenge” is going to change the way we do things here in the office. I’m hopeful it will last for more than a day.

Wisdom: “…or maybe even in an angry, venting screed that you never send.”

Thanks for the great post.

Merlin, I know that you receive exponentially more e-mail than I do, and I’m sure much of it comes from strangers like me. Which of course is the price of celebrity—fanmail is a long-standing phenomenon, as is the expectation of hearing back.

So I suspect that your experience with e-mail as it is today is atypical, especially compared to the Net-connected population at large. Also the experience of IT folks is atypical, as they receive so many requests for a specific type of help.

I think that instead of your language of sanity vs. insanity, I would use the terminology of “humanizing” vs. “dehumanizing,” which is much more common parlance for discussions of the social and psychological ramifications of technologies.

In many ways e-mail, like all mediating (or interface) technologies, has great potential to dehumanize people. The more mediated our contact with one another, the less human our interaction. It’s the same as with driving in a car—if I cut someone off, I can’t apologize to them, or explain how I was confused about the route I was taking. And if someone is driving at me with their fog lights unnecessarily blinding me, I can’t explain to them what’s bothering me. All we can do is gesture and honk and curse. All that glass and metal and noise and velocity between us dehumanizes the interaction.

E-mail can also be totally neutral, as it is when we make choices about how to communicate with people we don’t know or do not see in person. It is our choices about how to write the e-mail that decide if it will be a humanizing or dehumanizing interaction.

E-mail can also be humanizing, when it becomes the subject for discussion between human beings who are in relationship or in community with one another. When I talk with my boss about how we prefer to use e-mail (we like e-mailing notes rather than interrupting each other with minor things), that’s a very humanizing, relationship-building conversation, and the resulting habits also are humanizing because they improve how we work together.

So yes, e-mail can encourage us to act insane (i.e., to dehumanize ourselves and others). It can also be neutral, or it can encourage us to act sanely (i.e, to act more like full-fledged humans). I think the interesting questions ask why this particular technology is sometimes dehumanizing and sometimes humanizing. What makes the difference?

As of posting this comment, that link to Tantek’s post links back to 43F.

(I really thought about whether to email this to you or not.)