[Air-l] destroying friendships?
bakera at ohiou.edu
bakera at ohiou.edu
Wed Apr 23 09:32:47 PDT 2003
While I agree with Nancy Baym and Steve Jones that a medium is
incapable in itself of destroying friendships, I want to add that, in
my view, characteristics of email can independently influence the
communication process to some extent:
--The permanence or relatively long-lasting imprinting of words can
sometimes affect people more deeply than words uttered in passing.
Along with nonverbal softenings or qualifiers, people can more easily
come back and say they weren't so serious about the opinion, or even
that they had changed their minds. With asynchronous conferencing
and listservs or even logged synchronous writings from chat or IM's,
the rereading of the words can possibly affect people differently
than just hearing the words out loud.
--As several people have mentioned, reading the contrary thoughts
sent to everyone on the list could provoke embarrassment as well as
intellectual disagreement or anger. For this reason, among others,
I choose not to receive an individual's emails to a list of people
whenever possible. Actually I hope my postings here on the air-list
do not in any way disrupt pleasant colleague relationships I may have
established in the past. :-)
Do we have research on negative sentiments or disagreements expressed
f2f vs. email? I know we have some good experimental studies
comparing liking and self-disclosure for the two modes.
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