I have often mentioned that both email and texting carry with them an air of impersonality, of impatience, and of conspicuous disrespectful multitasking. While my basic feelings are somewhat the same as they were a year ago (see below), "enhanced" emails and mobile messages can carry much more detail, gravity, personality and even intimacy if they are done with painstaking care. Here's my view from the past:
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Email is the appropriate broadcast or distribution forum for non-time-sensitive mass mailing, sending newsletters, for issuing memos (where an electronic record should be retained) and for sending large attachments. It is superb for contracts, as well. It is becoming somewhat outmoded by many other signaling mechanisms and applications, but it is still quite useful.
Having said this, email does not work, (certainly not even as effectively as instant messaging, rapid back-and-forth texting, telephoning, web conferencing or just getting together (in the real world, and not in some coffee chatroom in cyberspace), for having a conversation. Here's why:
1) Too much time may lapse between sending, receiving and responding. Momentum is lost, timeliness is lost, spontaneity is lost, and nuances of meaning are lost. Emails are cold representatives, and very flat-affect messengers. No brainstorming every happened through a discrete series of emails.
2) If your email subject line isn't a grabber, you're liable to wind up being inadvertently deleted -- and you'll sit stewing in anger on the wrongful assumption that your email was read. There is so much correspondence in the average inbox that your missive is likely to be missed. If it is read by the intended recipient, it may be read more than a day after it was sent.
3) Email now carries a cache, deservedly or not, of being one-sided, and is generally read with a modicum of prejudice against the sender. The hidden message that supersedes and often outweighs the email content is that "I am making a declaration from the mountaintop, and I don't wish to be interrupted by your thoughts or questions."
If you truly want to accomplish something, conversations are best carried out where there is a facility and expectation of rapid thought and response...sort of like neurons transmitting a signal.
The bottom line is this: Use email wisely. It is a useful tool for transmitting information. But never use it as a platform for passionate, urgent or sensitive conversation. It works against you.
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Now I'll take a moment to update and modify my stance (Man -- how I hate to be proven wrong!). With the availability, increasing popularity and increasing quality of voicemail embeds (http://audioboo.fm), where people can hear you speak, with the utmost sincerity for up to 3 minutes -- and with the embedding of either webcam or other videos, slideshows, hysterically-scripted avatars (http://www.voki.com), and 2 minute cartoons (http://goanimate.com), an email or text message can be personalized, more sensorially captivating, and much more meaningful.
It even affords the sender a chance to put extra creativity, and an echo of his or her personality into the transmittal.
I would strongly suggest that you give these enhancements a try -- not only for basic person-to-person communications, but even for group messages, entertainment of the recipients and serious marketing and branding. We'll have to wake up the folks at MAD MARKETING TACTICS about this development.
In the meantime, meet a friend of mine from the skeleton crew who went out on a wild bender last night and forgot to attend his ladyfriend's dinner dance...He appears to us through Voki.
You might want to forward this to all of your friends, with the possible exception of your mom or your psychiatrist....
http://SendingSignals.blogspot.com
http://TakingCommand.blogspot.com
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