I like to talk. Anyone who knows me knows that I like to talk. In fact, being engaged in a conversation with intelligent people is among my most cherished experiences. Just ask my book club buddies, who will agree that a minimum of three conversations going on at once is the ultimate joy for all of us.
Now that that’s out in the open, let’s converse about email – the essence of no talking allowed! That’s right. Thanks to e-mail, people “say” anything they want to without regard for the personal reaction of the recipient of the message. It just doesn’t matter.
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Well, I don’t know about you, but I have had it with e-mail. In the last three months, I have received the most obnoxious e-mails ever. People “say” things in email messages that they would never say face-to-face. My guess is that they feel free to insult, exploit, and take advantage of the impersonal nature of e-mail. The problem is, as impersonal as email has become, email is delivered by persons and received by persons! Hence the problem.
My other theory is that people who depend on e-mails to “speak” for them don’t know how to communicate anyway. They’d much prefer to sit alone, “talking” to a computer screen, while thinking of themselves as all knowing about all of those things they think they know about. Never mind the recipient of the message and how they might react to the string of words sent across fiber optics. There is no heart, mind or soul to a fiber optic that I know about. And if there were, Ms. Fiber Optic would be cold and calculating to allow the rude messages I have recently received to criss-cross through.
There is a technique that trained psychologists, mediators, and human resource specialists use to solve problems between people. They will say, “I think I’m hearing you say that you feel” this way or that way about this or that. Can you imagine a psychologist trying to bring two people together who have been engaged in sending lousy e-mails to one another with this tried-and-true method of inter-personal compromise, when the two e-mailers can’t hear anything? It just won’t work when the auditory sense doesn’t play a role in the “conversation.”
And what about e-mails that are sent to groups of people? If you’ve never received an e-mail as part of a group of recipients, here’s how it goes: One person writes a message and sends it along to a group of people. Each receiver can decide to respond or not. Depending on the message, the interpretation of the words on the screen by the recipient, and the recipient’s attitude about the message, the “game” begins. The problem is, you become part of the game whether you want to or not. And if the game is one that you would prefer not playing, well, too bad for you, you’re in it whether you want to be or not! Your name is on the “send to” line for everybody to see.
So what’s the answer? I suggest following the Golden Rule: Treat people the way you want to be treated. But better yet, if you can’t e-mail something nice, then don’t e-mail at all!
Could we start talking again, please!
Claire Eckert is director of communications the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation.
