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February 13, 2009
E-mail is a great tool. It's making you nuts. Call me.
I remember when I first got e-mail, back in the mid-1990s. I would rush home with great anticipation and dial in my 4800-baud modem and I would have...four messages from four very good friends....Now, of course, I get up in the morning and go to my computer and have sixty-four messages, and the anticipation I once felt has been replaced by dread.
--Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point, in Afterword to 2002 edition, 274 (Little, Brown and Co.)
I receive between 70 and 90 non-spam e-mails a day. I write about one-third that many, most as replies. Usually short ones. They are often soulless, and easy to misunderstand, even when I try to be precise. As it's been seven years since he wrote the above, and he is even more famous, Gladwell surely gets more than 100 each day. It's a mantra now that communications technologies save time and money, including bucks on brick and mortar rents for business. It's all true, exciting, Yankee innovative-cool and--a word film actor William Hurt uncannily slips into so many of his lines over the years--forever "evolving."
See Me, Feel Me, Call Me. But some of us don't even talk as much to people we see every day at work. We do e-mail. What happened to voices, vibes, faces, bodies, winks, hand gestures, touching another's hand or shoulder impulsively, stares, grins, frowns, hand-written thank you notes, human electricity, NOT-typing, non-virtual joking, yelling, ragging and flirting, occasional confrontation, intimacy and the "god-in-the-room" magic that starts with two breathing humans in one 3-D place? Or at least on the phone?
Posted by JD Hull at February 13, 2009 12:59 AM
Comments
Great post Dan. I was reminded of an old quote from Earl Long, former governor of Louisiana: "Don't write anything you can phone. Don't phone anything you can talk. Don't talk anything you can whisper. Don't whisper anything you can smile. Don't smile anything you can nod. Don't nod anything you can wink."
Now admittedly the point and context of this quote are somewhat different, but it does underscore the importance all of the senses play in effective communication. The more senses you can involve, the better.
Posted by: Patrick Lamb at February 13, 2009 10:25 AM