Words Are Not Enough

Techniques To Inject The Senses in E-Mail

Carol Anne Ogdin
Founder, Deep Woods Technology, Inc.

E-mail as a New Medium

      The life-long traditions of interpersonal communications in which we have been reared are being shaken by the explosive growth of electronic communications.  The store-and-forward nature of today's contemporary technology, with messages in text, voice, and images, are freeing us from the confines of time and space. 

     My response to your electronic letter of yesterday can be answered, at my leisure, over my morning teaor I can defer that until more important matters are settled; we may yet break the tyranny of the insistently ringing telephone. Yet, these choices of medium for our messages are not without personal consequence; you lose, for instance, the satisfaction of engaging me in idle chit-chat just so we can share each other's voices and confirm our growing rapport. And your clever remark typed in jest skimmed by me in a more sober frame of mind may inspire a reaction you hadn't anticipated; it's hard to be cynical in ASCII.

     The written word offers the promise of comprehension over space and time; we can read what has been written at considerable distance from the reader, that distance measured in meters or hours. The spoken word, on the other hand, produces a richer communication experience; we listen to what has been spoken with nuances of tonality, rhythm and pacing, all of which contain additional information beyond the words uttered.  Until the advent of modern recording technology, the written word was the only way to communicate across space and time; the spoken word was passed from speaker-to-listener, usually with some corruption at each successive step of the way.   The integration of the written and spoken word through modern technology is leading us to an entirely new range of communication options, and we may not be prepared for the behavioral changes that will be required.

Annotated Text

     Throughout the written word on the printed page, or on a graphically-rich computer screen, we use color and space and typography to aid the reader's interpretation.  In many computer-based systems (e.g., e-mail), there's nothing but the textual letters:  Formatting is removed and unavailable as a tool.   So, some typographic conventions have emerged, for example:

Spelling It Out

     I'm not *always* right!  <grin>

Efficiency in Text

     In linguistics, Zipf's Law says that the more common a word or phrase becomes, the shorter it becomes over time.  In electronic media, many people use common abbreviations for whole phrases, some of which may not be readily meaningful to a novice.  For example:

Symbolic Emotions

     Even while living strictly within a digital communications medium like e-mail, the human need and drive for meta-communication is so great that even richer customs have evolved.  The representation of a smile, for example, which often completely reverses the sense of meaning in a sentence uttered in fact-to-face conversation, has no intrinsic symbol in the digital world of linear lines of characters. Some clever soul first originated the iconic representation of a smile with three simple characters:

:-)

(If it isn't clear, look at it after turning your head 90-degrees toward your left shoulder.)  Because these ostensibly represent emotions, they are called emoticons. A particularly sarcastic remark that might be misinterpreted is invariably followed by the obligatory "smiley face."  A whole lexicon of possible expressions (and insults) is emerging, 'tho most people use only this common example.

Behavioral Trends

     And this leads to the most interesting set of questions of all: In what ways can we expect behavior to change, and how do we appropriately educate people about the appropriate uses of today's and tomorrow's communications technologies? As one composes a paper, with full knowledge of the separation in space and time from the reader, the author generally takes into account the need to use the digital representation of information with precision, lest the meaning be obscured by irrelevant ambiguities. In fact-to-face dialog, we are seldom so precise, because we count on any ambiguities to be resolved in the immediacy of the exchange. In the "in-between" world of on-line, asynchronous computer-mediated communications, there are different customs and methods necessary, and no universal agreement on what they most beneficially might be. Most people come to the new medium with more experience in spoken exchange, and they tend to adopt those styles--even though the medium requires "sifting" that style through a linear string of words. The results are often misinterpretation and can frequently descend to insulting exchanges as each party clings to his/her own understanding of what was meant.

     In the immediate future, while we live within these worlds of communications media with limited expressiveness, we will need to hone personal communication skills to overcome limitations of the media. In the further future, with the widespread adoption of additional analog information channels enriching the principal written word, we will need to evolve new sets of appropriate communications behaviors, for selecting the best mix from among the available tools will become a more difficult task. On the long-term, we can begin to question what will be the essential and surviving media: Will the written word even be required as a way to crystallize the sensory-grounded communication of personal knowledge?

     The customary, linear presentation of text messages in electronic communication is, in its own way, a significant inhibitor of quality dialog. It is easy to miss an important point raised in a short message from an unexpected source, when the on-going dialog swamps out that message with another 40 or 50 messages on similar topics created since the last time mail was checked. There is, in contemporary technology, a disparity between the instantaneous volume—often emotion-driven—and the apparent importance of each individual message. Each "thread" of related messages may contain numerous tangents and branch-out points, each with their own interested readers. Recent "mapping" capabilities that provide graphic representation of these non-linear flows (such as the example here, edited from a public discussion on CompuServe) can help the reader navigate more quickly to the points of interest. Compuserve's map, however, shows only the message originator's name; the discrete subject of each of the three "sub-threads," and the dates of contribution might also prove important in most applications.

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