[Air-l] e-mail destroying friendships?

[Art McGee]

1. Email didn't destroy your friendship, previously
unrecognized political differences did. There is a similar
pattern that emerges often in interracial friendships, where
folks start out laughing and loving, but when you peel back
the veneer of compatibility, the unspoken political and
social worldviews that are often tethered to ethnic (or
gender, or sexual) identities cause a rupture in the once
happy pairings. Usually it's not nearly so caustic as what
you described, rather, people just stop communicating with
one another and drift away.

2. Email didn't destroy your friendship, your poor use of it
did. It was incredibly bad for you to forward emails to a
group of people who don't know each other, without Blind
Carbon Copying them. The only time emails of that nature
should be sent is when people have opted-in to a mailing
list of some sort, or when you know for sure that everyone
on the list is familiar with each other in at least some
rudimentary way. Bad netiquette, very bad.


Art