E-mail: Toward an Etiquette of Use
William Illsey Atkinson, who lives in North Vancouver, B.C., and holds U.S. and Canadian citizenship, has written extensively on science and technology for the Globe and Mail. He is the winner of the 1997 Dalhousie University Prix D'Excellence in Issues Writing.
He also happens to be a very good friend and colleague with whom I worked while at the National Research Council. His contributions to Science Dimension and the diffusion of news about Canadian science has been outstanding. Bill has a keen sense of science and an appreciation of people and, most importantly, a sense of humour. The following article appeared in his latest book and I think you will agree that it is timely and appropriate. Enjoy.
-- Louis P. Visentin, President and Vice-Chancellor
This article is reprinted with the permission of the author William Illsey Atkinson from his award-winning book Prototype: How Canadian Innovation is Shaping the Future (2002, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto; ISBN 0-919028-47-0).
by William Illsey Atkinson
An energy barrier in a communication medium is not all bad. The time cost of writing longhand or on a typewriter, like the phone's instant two-way voice contact, discourages hasty outbursts. Slag the older media if you wish, but credit them with fostering sober second thought. E-mail can be the moron's darling, the fast, sure way to shoot yourself in the knee. Is there a user of e-mail who has never groaned in anguish as an ill-considered message winged away?
While E-mail is fast and efficient, it can also make you seem illiterate. People forgive bad grammar and misspellings on a Post-it Note, for it's scrawled in haste. But an E-mail appears in type as clear and readable as a hard-cover book. Messages such as 12 PM MGRS OFFC or HOPE YOUR BETER are like jabs in the eye.
Restrictions acceptable in other media create eyesores in E-mail. The worst of these is length. One executive I know restricts her E-mails to one screen: anything longer must go by snail mail. Shovelling megawords into E-mails is an imposition.
Here's Dr. Prabhakar Ragde, a professor of computing science at the University of Waterloo.
"People can justly expect you to remember a long letter better than a long E-mail," Prabhakar writes to me (via E-mail, of course). "You invest less time in composing and processing E-mail, and you get more information by E-mail than you do by personal letter. Both these things give written mail more intrinsic heft. A physical letter cues us to pay attention." In letters as in forests, it seems, volume and value are two different things.
Issues growing up around E-mail are both legal and social, Prabhakar tells me. "Legally, you could E-mail someone the Encyclopedia Britannica and then testify you briefed them on the habits of the Algerian fennec. Socially, that's a mistake."
Discussions of length lead naturally to the topic of word overload. "The sheer quantity of my E-mail messages is a problem," write another correspondent, Dr. Robin Cohen. Like Prabhakar, Robin is a computer-science professor at UWaterloo. She offers a solution: E-mail could "introduce a standard subhead that indicates the nature of the message. Currently a sender's name doesn't telegraph an E-mail's importance. Is this message from my friend Jane Doe with a dinner invitation, or Jane Doe my committee chair with the minutes of the meeting? When I see a number of unopened messages, I need to know at once which ones are vital and which are optional."
A big part of overload involves junk E-mail. Computer geeks nickname this spam, after the only thing on the menu in a Monty Python skit. Spam may comprise advertisements or the electronic equivalent of mass mailing. Greed tempts to the former, sloth to the latter. Why send selectively when you can scatter your note to the winds and reach anyone who's remotely involved? But temptation must be resisted: you must think about your addresses as well as your message. "I find spam very irritating," Robin grumbles. "I'd like to see it hit with a blanket ban."
Is E-mail a private communication like a letter, or a publication like a newspaper? If it's a publication, how many people must receive a message before it becomes a magazine?
"I don't know what the law thinks," says Prabhakar Ragde, "and I suspect the law doesn't know what it thinks either. Such questions will be decided not by legislatures, but case by case."
Prabhakar believes that creating a Web page, or posting an E-mail to a news-group list, is clearly publication. Still, questions remain. "Should E-mail carry the same weight as paper publication in cases of libel? This is not a legal issue -- it's a social problem. We will resolve it as a culture."
Another hot E-mail issue is privacy. Here are the considered comments of a legal expert in the subject, who is also president of the University of Waterloo, Dr. David Johnston.
"It's a good analogy to consider E-mail a postcard, rather than a letter," David writes. "There's no way to guarantee the content of an E-mail will be concealed. But while someone sending a postcard knows that anyone may read it, few people realize that E-mail has a similarly public nature. Because they compose, send, and read E-mail in solitude, they assume it is as private as their thoughts. E-mail horror stories usually involve people who discover they've been thinking out loud in the wrong company."
Such stories often involve E-mails that are modern variants of that ancient cliché, the indiscreet letter. A hundred twenty years after he said it, Mark Twain's wry axiom "Do right, and fear no man; don't write, and fear no woman" rings true for users of E-mail.
Some people believe that as technology created E-mail, technology can safeguard it. Knowledge companies are springing up, promising to encrypt messages and give an E-mail the same security as snail mail. But this approach is not a blanket solution, Prabhakar Ragde writes.
"Encryption may answer some questions," he explains. "It can transmit a message when both sender and receiver want to exclude everyone in between. But who encrypts everything they do, every time? Unless people can configure every one of their mailers to encrypt all text automatically, encryption technology will not be used." Besides, Prabhakar says, the weakest links in any cryptographic system come at its ends. "All it takes to violate security is for someone to leave unencrypted text on a hard drive, or to print out a copy and leave it unattended."
As for E-mail etiquette in general, here are David Johnston's wise words: "There are things that you'll say to your dog that you would, and should, never utter to another human being. It is not hypocrisy to understand this, merely prudence. Effective use of any medium demands a constant knowledge of occasion."
Another of E-mail's unresolved issues is liability. Society, says David, does not vet newspapers prior to publication: "We consider that censorship. If a paper damages a reputation, we deal with that after the fact, via libel law. Newspaper reporters and publishers have grown aware of such consequences, so they tend to write responsibly." Users of E-mail would do well to adopt these good journalistic habits.
"Only after a medium appears can society develop protocols and conventions for using it," David cautions. "We've had five centuries to do this for book publishing and three centuries for newspapers. In both media we found a balance between prudent expression and free expression. For E-mail, this process has hardly begun."
Realizing that it's still early days for E-mail makes one less frantic about lacking all the answers. So do expert opinions that E-mail isn't about to crowd out every other medium in the next few years. "Although it's here to stay, E-mail won't replace all other means of communication," Robin Cohen writes. "You can't scribble on an E-mail, or read it over breakfast, or stuff it into your briefcase and lug it to a meeting, or read it in the bath. You need hard copy for that." Of course, but one click on the PRINT icon . . .
A final rule: don't put rules ahead of judgment. Late one evening I got a despondent message from my daughter at university. The more I examined my own guidelines, the less they seemed to apply. Brevity? She needed all the advice I could give her. Further, she had to know that she merited my time. Think twice? Soonest was evidently best. Avoid impolite language? I decided I'd rather sound like the dad she knows. My reply to her broke all my own rules, and the next night, I found it had cheered my daughter wonderfully. The conclusion is inescapable. In E-mail, as in all media, the first and last consideration is knowing how far to go too far. That's a famous definition of tact.