The Hindu Business Line : Why e-mail can fail

Before you click to open your inbox, it may help to know that bad things happen on e-mail, as rues a new book. E-mail can go awry, and our difficulties with e-mail can't simply be blamed on its youth, write David Shipley and Will Schwalbe in Send (www.landmarkonthenet. com).

The book grapples with many questions, such as: "Why do we send so many electronic messages that we never should have written? Why do things spin out of control so quickly? Why don't people remember that e-mail leaves an indelible electronic record? Why do we forget to compose our messages carefully so that people will know what we want without having to guess?"

When you don't consciously insert tone into an e-mail, a kind of universal default tone won't automatically be conveyed, the authors caution. "Message written without regard to tone becomes a blank screen onto which the reader projects his own fears, prejudices, and anxieties."

Unfortunately for e-mail, its woes may not be shared by other forms of electronic communication such as IM (instant messaging) or texting, which come close to replicating the real-time back-and-forth exchange as in personal conversations.

Also, unlike e-mails, "they tend to take place among people with whom you have some sort of association or affinity. They have a relatively consistent default tone - one of chatty casualness."

In e-mails, the distinction between formal and informal communication gets blurred, sometimes to dangerous effect, bemoan the authors.

To accentuate the problems, e-mails happen inevitably too fast. "We are in the position of having to get our messages right dozens or even hundreds of times a day, often under intense pressure, and for recipients whose needs, attitudes, and moods are constantly changing."

With speed, we lose our cool, and so on e-mail, we aren't quite ourselves, lament Shipley and Schwalbe. "E-mail has a tendency to encourage the lesser angels of our nature." The angrier, less sympathetic, less aware, more easily wounded, even more gossipy and duplicitous selves.

"Send is your computer's most alluring command. But before you succumb, always proofread your document one last time," the authors advise.

They suggest that while proofreading, you should keep in mind the acronym SEND: for Simple, Effective, Necessary, and Done. If the e-mail isn't simple, it will create confusion and waste resources, so start removing words and sentences until the whole thing is as tight and pared down as you can make it without losing your meaning, the authors guide.

On effectiveness, their words of wisdom are that most correspondence has to get it right the first time out. "You may not have another chance to connect with the person you're trying to reach."

Another golden rule about e-mails is that what's not necessary should be deleted. "We all spend far too much time asking one another to do things that are essentially frivolous - and the cost to business and to all of our lives is staggering," fret Shipley and Schwalbe.

"If you don't really need to know something, don't ask. The higher you are in an organisation, the more important it is to heed this principle." Ask yourself, therefore, what would happen if you didn't send that email you've just composed. "If the answer is `Nothing much,' then it's probably best that you trash it. But don't forget: individualised e-mails that exist solely to reinforce your connection to another person are necessary, too."

Finally, `done' is about following up on your e-mail. Figure out how you are going to follow up, the authors counsel; just because you asked for some action in response doesn't mean it's going to happen. A major temptation, however, to withstand is taking the monkey off your back by putting it on someone else's! "Is the thing you are asking someone else to do something you should be doing yourself?"

Imperative read.

Call of the blogosphere

Eurotrash, Language Log, Micrographica, Ironic Sans, Cosmic Variance, Click Opera, The Smoking Gun. plus a score more finds from `the wild web' have been anthologised in Ultimate Blogs edited by Sarah Boxer (www.vintagebooks.com).

Her choice of bloggers is diverse - in terms of nationality, sex, age, genre (nonfiction, fiction, poetry, comics and photography), subject (culture, public policy, cosmology, fashion, family, motherhood, literature, and so on), popularity, and blog name (eponymous, epithetical, prepositional, imperative, and declarative).

Bloggy writing, Boxer describes, is conversational and reckless, composed on the fly for anonymous intimates. "It is public and private, grand and niggling. Bloggers won't help you catch up if you missed the last instalment. They often begin midthought or midrant, in medias craze.They use their own trademark words, and give new meanings to old ones."

Most bloggers don't care if they leave you in the dust, the author observes. "They assume that if you're reading them, you're either one of their friends or at least in on their gossip, their jokes, or the names they drop. They're not responsible for your education."

While not every good writer can make good bloggy prose, Boxer finds that some bloggers out there, among the 80 million - and counting - on the blogosphere, actually write good bloggy prose that non-blog readers can read.

"They are the ones in this book. They are not only stunning writers but use the Internet well too.

Some use it as a writing prod. Some use it as a trash can. Some use it like a diary. Some use it like a pulpit. Some use it like a drawing pad. Some use it like a padded room. Some use it to reach out. Some use it to reach in. Some use it to get mad. Some use it to get even."

A collection worth trawling into.

Explorers of cyberspace

Satanbug: On this eerie note Indra Sinha begins The Cybergypsies (www.simonsays. co.uk).

"The satellite relay kicks in." And you meet Geno Paris, the self-styled `technopath,' who is the proprietor of one of the biggest virus collections on the Net: "all the common viruses you'll find on any bug-exchange bulletin board, plus hundreds of exotic specimens, various unidentified species culled from the wild and not a few he has written himself. He has links to every major partisan group in the virus underground."

Geno makes a transatlantic call, which may not be from his own phone, posits the author. "Roaming the pre-internet net is expensive, which is why so many of its denizens are there courtesy of someone else's phone bill.

The first task for a hacker, long before he starts breaking into other people's computers, is to find a way to do it at someone else's expense. It's almost a law of net life. To survive for long as a serious net nomad, you need to be a hacker. Or rich."

The next chapter is titled `The Oklahoma Institute of Virus Research,' the name of a hidden part of Geno's bulletin board. "It is a computer-generated mirage, a cloud castle." explains Sinha, through the protagonist `Bear'.

Faster than the jet set is the net set, declares the author. "They can flit from London to San Francisco to Finland in seconds, and have friends, on whom they regularly call, in places like Sarajevo, Bombay and Vladivostok."

Who are they? "Some may be known to you as scientists, housewives, musicians, policemen, yet in other guises you have probably fought them on multi-user games or flirted with them in that haven of deep roleplayers, the Vortex."

These people are the cybergypsies, the explorers of cyberspace, observes Sinha. "Theirs were the first camps in cyberspace. They mapped it and made its links. They named the constellations of its night sky.

They share your secret life, and guilt."

Racy read.

Tailpiece

"Buy one, get three!"

"Problems?"

"No, mobiles!"

dmurali@thehindu.co.in