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From: zwicky@itstd.sri.com (Elizabeth Zwicky)
Newsgroups: comp.society
Subject: Re: Too Much Computer is bad
Message-ID: <972@limbo.Intuitive.Com>
Date: 11 Jul 90 09:16:51 GMT
Sender: taylor@limbo.Intuitive.Com
Organization: SRI International, Menlo Park, CA 94025
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Approved: taylor@Limbo.Intuitive.Com

Martin Hall writes:

> E-mail is a lot like a FAX machine, you can contact someone while they 
> are out.  But unlike a phone or being in person, you cannot get any 
> emotional input from the person.   There have been studies (no references) 
> that say that 80-90% of what is communicated is is done by body language 
> and inflections in the voice.  E-mail has none of this.

I disagree; I spent some time just after I moved to California without
a phone, and did all my communication with friends and family via
e-mail.  Certainly I got a lot of emotional input that way. (In fact,
for much of the year most of my contact with my father is via e-mail,
and we are hardly un-emotional.) 

Statistics about how much is conveyed via intonation, pauses, and body
language are misleading. Spoken speech and written speech rely on
different systems of cues to indicate things. Some large percentage of
the information conveyed by intonation and pauses is equivalent to the
information provided by punctuation and paragraphing in written
speech. Another large chunk of it goes as cues for interactivity ("you
can interrupt me now" "I am still listening to you" "I am trying to
interrupt you now") Spoken speech tends to be more telegraphic and
error-prone than written; people leave things out, or make mistakes
that they have time to edit out in writing. Body language and
intonation compensate for this, as well. Certainly they don't contain
80-90% of the meaning - imagine trying to converse with some when you
get only the intonation, pauses, and body language.

> I have had people say some pretty mean things over e-mail, and then 
> talk to me later as if nothing happened.  

This may simply be a matter of clashing communication styles; one
person's idea of mean may be another person's idea of having an
interesting intellectual argument. (I have seen this happen in
face-to-face conversations as well, with people telling me "So-and-so
thinks I'm stupid and can't make a contribution" when I was able to
verify that So-and-so merely thought they were temporarily incorrect.
"That's a stupid idea" would be a crushing insult to me from my
father, who doesn't say things like that. From one of the guys I work
with, it wouldn't even cause me a moment of doubt - it's his way of
saying "I disagree with you". He would completely astounded if I took
it as a personal criticism.) Deborah Tannenbaum's book "That's not
what I meant" talks at length about how communications mismatches like that
occur face-to-face.

Elizabeth Zwicky