[Air-l] e-mail destroying friendships?
Esther Milne
EMilne at groupwise.swin.edu.au
Tue Apr 22 17:10:21 PDT 2003
and let;s not forget that unauthorised 'forwarding' has a technological
precedent. In eighteenth and nineteenth century epistolary practice it
was not uncommon for letters to be circulated within a particular
community *without* the consent or knowledge of the original author.
just my two cents (and doctoral thesis on the correspondence between
email and postal technologies) worth!
cheers,
Esther
Esther Milne
Lecturer in Media and Communications
School of Social & Behavioural Sciences
Swinburne University of Technology
John Street
Hawthorn VIC 3122
AUSTRALIA
Tel: +613 92148195
Fax: +613 98190574
>>> c.chesher at unsw.edu.au 04/22/03 09:41pm >>>
On Tuesday, April 22, 2003, at 02:01 AM, Charles Ess
<cmess at lib.drury.edu>
wrote:
> a friend with a specific political viewpoint regularly forwards
> e-mails to a
> list of friends;
> at some point, someone in the group strongly disagrees with the
> perspective
> / argument represented in a forward - and, instead of ignoring the
> matter,
> fires back to the whole group;
What strikes me as distinctive in this scenario is the cultural form of
the act of email forwarding. I do think that it risks destroying
friendships!
In a f2f conversation you might cite some other authority in stating a
political position. But when you forward a polemical email, you're
using a huge slab-quote. It is more analogous to passing out a pamphlet
than to stating an opinion in the context of a discussion. Not only
does your e-pamphlet text weaken your readers' sense that it has been
authored by a friend, but the fact that your message is addressed to a
large list of receivers also dilutes their sense that the message is
personally from you.
On the other hand, you probably feel strongly about the message. That's
why you chose to forward it to people who you believed shared the same
views. But the choice of who you add to the list of receivers is likely
to be less considered than for an email that you have written yourself,
because you've spent less time in composing it. And the opinions in the
email may be expressed more forcefully than you might put them in your
own words.
When you get the rebutting email you probably receive it as a personal
affront to you, rather than a rejection of the original email. And it's
in public -- posted to you and your other friends! The friendship is
definitely in trouble.
I think these risks are structured into the technocultural
configuration of the event of forwarding a politically inflected email
-- in its technical, textual, temporal, affective and interpersonal
specificity.
Chris
-- -
Dr Chris Chesher Work phone 61 2 9385 6814
Lecturer Mobile: 04040 95 480
School of Media and Communications Messages: 61 2 9385 6811
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Fax: 61 2 9385 6812
University of New South Wales Email: c.chesher at unsw.edu.au
UNSW Sydney 2052 http://mdcm.arts.unsw.edu.au/
_______________________________________________
Air-l mailing list
Air-l at aoir.org
http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l
More information about the Air-L
mailing list