[Air-l] e-mail destroying friendships?

[Chris Chesher]

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



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