Original_To:  BITNET%"mbu-l@ttuvm1.bitnet"
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mbu-l
Date:         Fri, 17 Apr 1992 07:32:00 EDT
From:         "Composition Digest (Robert Royar,
              Moderator)" <R0MILL01@ULKYVX.BITNET>
Subject:      (Fwd: *C&CD*) Re: (Fwd: *C&CD*) Time wasted on e-mail (11)
              (*COMP.COMP*) (5)

Date: 16 Apr 92 17:27:18 GMT
From: jtchew@csa3.lbl.gov (JOSEPH T CHEW)
Newsgroups: comp.edu.composition
Subject: Re: (Fwd: *C&CD*) Time wasted on e-mail (11) (*COMP.COMP*) (5)
Reply-to: comp.edu.composition <compos01%ulkyvx.bitnet@ucbvax.Berkeley.edu>

On another group, I once wrote a followup to the question, "Why don't
we see more scientific heavyweights on net-news?"  Long story short,
my answer was that the "signal-to-noise ratio" is usually too low,
and furthermore that the higher you go, the less time you have left
for your "real work" after fighting off all the other day-eaters.

Someone forwarded it to Donald Norman, who had recently become a
celebrity of sorts because of The Psychology of Everyday Things.
He hadn't read it personally because -- guess what -- he seldom
finds the time for netnews. In fact, he told me that he gets several
tens of thousands of E-mail messages a year!

Ponder that one for a moment.  Let's say that after POET has enjoyed
those proverbial 15 minutes, his electronic correspondence simmers
down to a permanent rate of 25,000 messages per year.  (This is pure
data-free speculation; I have no idea what the composition of his
mail avalanche might be.) A nice round number -- 100 per working day.
If he takes five minutes to read and respond to each one, he has
squandered an entire 8-hour day and then some, and hasn't even gotten
around to reading his snail mail.

Plainly he manages to cope, although I don't know just how.  Other
prominent netters seem to practice various forms of electronic kung-fu
for defending their time:  pre-screening by a secretary, cursory or
even form-letter replies, or, in some cases, a preemptory statement
that they try to read everything but cannot reply to everything.  In
other words, they have been forced to abandon the easy egalitarianism
of the network and handle E-mail the same way busy people handle their
regular mail and phone calls.

I've seen people have E-mail crises even when they drink from the
fountain of a private corporate network rather than the fire hose
of the Internet.  E-mail has its own rhetoric and sociology, and
in my anecdotal observations, most users, especially novices, don't
seem to understand either.

For starters, there seems to be an implication that the results will
be as easy and as rapid as the communication itself.  This resonates
destructively with the impersonality of the medium; a terminal, unlike
a phone or a meeting, gives you no indication of how busy your opponent
might be, or what kind of a day he's having.  Now combine this with the
egalitarianism mentioned above, which encourages any employee to give
a vice-president a piece of his mind about the new marketing strategy,
or any undergraduate to ask everybody from SLAC to CERN for help with
one of the old chestnuts from  her sophomore physics book.  This is a
formula not only for voluminous correspondence, but also for amplifi-
cation of small-scale inconsiderateness.

The easy access, speed, and general informality of the medium also
combine to encourage an informal writing style and a shoot-from-the-hip
strategy.  Through observations and occasional explicit discussions on
Usenet, I gather that some people take online writing quite seriously,
collecting their thoughts and polishing their words much as they would
for hardcopy publication.  But it seems as though most people, both
writers and readers, are much less careful, approaching electronic
interaction more like caffe banter than traditional business/scholarly
writing.  Immediacy seems more important than care, and the writer
and reader often semi-interactively muddle towards meaning.  (Sometimes
this entails either hilarious or appalling public discussion; I have
seen Usenet users start cursing at each other over whether a Mustang
is better than a Camaro.)

Some people faced with this Gordian knot of problems apply the
Alexandrian solution.  Others try to compromise.  One of my former
managers loved E-mail for its strengths but could no longer live
with its weaknesses.  What had begun as a productivity-enhancing
tool became a metronome for the business day.  People who might have
solved a problem on their own, or at least sought the answer in a
less frantic manner, kept his terminal beeping all day.  He was
trapped in an especially perverse corner of the car-phone-fax-it-
FedEx culture that compresses time but squeezes out prioritization
and thoughtful response.

Finally he inserted an artificial connectivity bottleneck. He made
it clear that he read his E-mail only at the beginning and end of
the day, and sometimes after lunch; people with more-pressing
problems had to approach him in a more-appropriate fashion.  Surprise!
He continued to work effectively and the world in general rotated on
its axis no less smoothly.

My apologies for a multi-kilobyte diatribe whose length suggests that
I have only partially learned my own lessons.  If this sounds like the
first collection of thoughts for a conference paper, it is, and I
welcome discussions, either on this group or through E-mail.

Joe
"The pallid pimp of the dead-line/The enervate of the pen" --Robert Service

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