Cutting-Edge Or Impersonal? Not Everyone Loves E-Mail

Everybody agrees that communicating by computer is growing in popularity.

Not everybody agrees that it’s a good thing.

E-mail is quick, taking only seconds to deliver a message. It’s easy - a few clicks of a mouse button and you’ve sent it. It’s cheap - no postage costs or long-distance bills.

But it can feel impersonal to the receiver. It doesn’t convey emotions or subtleties very well. And - perhaps most important - a “private” message often doesn’t stay private very long.

“Like any new technology, there are wide-reaching effects,” says Neal Goldsmith, president of Tribeca Research in New York City, a “technology strategy” consulting firm. “There’ll be both good and bad … the messages are, in some ways, more like speech because people don’t polish their written materials. But it’s a danger, too; you can send something that’s informal and thousands of people can end up seeing it.”

“Some people have speculated that human interaction will devolve into nothing more than e-mail,” says Dinty W. Moore, an assistant professor of English at Penn State University and author of the newly published “The Emperor’s Virtual Clothes: The Naked Truth About Internet Culture” (Algonquin). “That would be tragic. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think e-mail is going to become just another way of communicating, like the phone.

“What I found researching my book is that e-mail helps a lot of people with psychological disorders, medical conditions, people who are shy or agoraphobic.

“Never in a million years would they go to a counselor or a group, but they’re getting into these discussion groups because they feel anonymous. It’s a safe place.”

John Wilson, dean of the college of arts, letters and sciences at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., uses e-mail for professional and personal purposes, including keeping in touch with his daughters in Oklahoma, Atlanta and Russia.

“There really is such a thing as cyberspace and it affects a family in an interesting way,” Wilson says. “In 10 minutes, we can essentially have a family meeting.”

He says, however, that e-mail shouldn’t substitute for face-to-face conversation.

“There are all kinds of subtleties that one can’t pick up on an e-mail message; that’s why people have created all these smiley faces (using punctuation marks). The main value is that it’s very easy and very quick.”

His boss, university President David Davenport, wrote an almost plaintive article for Computerworld magazine in June 1994, decrying the growing use of e-mail for personal communication.

“You know what I’ve discovered?” asked Davenport. “Everybody’s sending me information, but nobody talks to me anymore. The great irony is that with all we hear about the information superhighway and data streaking across the world, people are hunkered over their work stations and are talking to one another less and less.”

Professor Steve Jones, chairman of the Department of Communications at the University of Tulsa, recently published “Cybersociety” (Sage Publishing), described as a critical look at the premise of the Internet.

“I do use e-mail a lot, both for business and personal, but I’m skeptical of the hype about ‘bringing people closer together,”’ says Jones. “It’s really no different than other communications technologies, only faster.

“E-mail actually enables us to somewhat avoid interpersonal relationships. What you can do with e-mail is avoid conflict. … We’re so in need of community that we think e-mail and the (World Wide) Web and so on are going to build new communities for us and that somehow this is going to be a new virtual community.

“I find just the opposite. This is a very isolating process.

“Don’t try to kid me that you’re interacting more with other people.”

Many experts agree, however, that e-mail does enhance communications with people whom we might otherwise not talk at all.

When was the last time, for example, that you picked up the phone to say hello to your great-aunt in Albuquerque, or your old college buddy in Chicago, or your exboyfriend in Buffalo?

Communicating with such people, where it’s nice to “keep in touch,” but where phone conversations can be awkward or expensive, is often enhanced by e-mail.

“I don’t want to get (in touch with) people in real time, every time,” says Goldsmith, of Tribeca Research. “Why do you have to deal with the person’s kid or phone machine or whatever?”

“I hear (through e-mail) from an awful lot more friends whom I haven’t heard from in years,” says Linda Rae Markert, who chairs the Department of Technology at the State University of New York, Oswego. “I think people are writing more letters (via computer) to each other than perhaps in the previous 10 years.”

She thinks a more important area of concern about e-mail involves privacy. Because forwarding an electronic message is so easy and cheap (no need to retype, no need for stamps or a fax machine), a private note can become public very quickly.

Judy Tashbook of America Online gave the example of a Navy pilot who helped rescue Scott O’Grady, the U.S. aviator who was shot down in Bosnia in June.

“The pilot sent e-mail about his experience to his friends, fighter jocks, that they forwarded to other people. It wound up going all over the world,” Tashbook says.

“It was an exciting story, but it contained code words and other military secrets. It was really potentially dangerous and damaging.

“It was really a good lesson to everybody. In essence, when you send an e-mail message, you’re publishing it, because you don’t know who’s going to get it.”

Janette Benson, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Denver, says some of the features that make e-mail communication easier “are the same features that highlight its weaknesses.”

“For example, people tend to be less inhibited when they communicate via e-mail, and this can be both positive and negative.

“Young women who … would never speak out in a large college lecture hall may be more comfortable using e-mail to communicate with a professor. However … some people get carried away and find it easier to communicate about taboo topics that they would never raise during faceto-face communication.”

Even if e-mail isn’t appealing, you may not have much choice. Simba Information, an information research firm based in Wilton, Conn., estimates that by the end of 1994, approximately 30 million people were connected to the Internet, giving them e-mail capabilities.

By the year 2000, the company estimates, that number will have risen to 300 million. The result is that avoiding e-mail will probably be a lot like trying to boycott another major advancement in communications technology: the telephone.

, DataTimes MEMO: See two related stories under the following headlines: E-Mail: Computers breed a letter-writing renaissance Here are the ABC’s of e-mail

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