The Dark Side of Email

Remember what it was like to communicate with a Sierra Club group in the old days? Photocopy your letter, then address, stuff, stamp and mail envelopes? Isn't e-mail a wonderful convenience? Yes, it is, but e-mail has a dark side. When conflicts arise, some kind of e-mail related aggravation is often a key element.

Let's look at the worst first - the 'flaming' e-mail. You are reading a thread of e-mail messages on some controversial subject and you find one you really disagree with and you decide it demands a reply. You start composing your eloquent reply. Then you kick it up a step with a dose of sarcasm. Then you suggest that the other person's viewpoint is so mistaken as to suggest a lack of intelligence - or maybe integrity. And to make that zinger really sting, you throw in a cheap shot about some irrelevant personal issue. Now this creation deserves to be broadcast widely, so you don't just reply, you reply to all.

Flaming e-mails have two negative effects. The first and most obvious is that they can be very hurtful to the person targeted in the attack and violate our obligation to treat other members with courtesy and respect. The second and less obvious is that others who are copied are often dismayed by the negative tone a discussion has taken on and they drop out of the discussion. If this happens often, pretty soon volunteers start dropping out of leadership positions because it has just stopped being fun.

The flaming e-mail is often composed by someone who is perfectly civil in face-to-face conversation. There is something about the e-mail communication medium that sometimes turns Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde. Here are some suggestions to avoid going over the line.

Review your message carefully before sending. Would you use the same language if you were chatting in person over a cup of coffee about a friendly disagreement?

Don't hit the 'send' button while you are angry. Save your composition as a draft overnight and look at it again before sending.

If you feel you must criticize someone, think twice before using the 'reply to all' option. Public criticism is far more inflammatory than private criticism.

The 'reply to all' option brings us to our next topic - unwanted proliferation of e-mail. We are not talking about 'spam', or unwelcome bulk mailings by strangers trying to sell you something. We are talking about getting more e-mail than you want from people you know. Most commonly this occurs when people on a large distribution list overuse the 'reply to all' option.

Some messages invite open discussion and 'reply to all' is an appropriate way to share your views. Other messages neither invite nor require public discussion and either replying just to the sender or not replying at all should be sufficient. When a message is distributed to a lot of recipients, and then a lot of those recipients 'reply to all' with information that isn't really of interest to all, the result is mailbox clutter and e-mail fatigue. Even when public discussion is invited, an endless cycle of rebuttals and surrebuttals can grow tedious.

What if you find yourself in the distribution list for a discussion which really does not interest you - what can you do? There are two basic strategies:

You can open each message that doesn't interest you, read it carefully, compose a long, grumpy message explaining just exactly why you find this discussion uninteresting, and then 'reply to all' to produce maximum clutter in everyone else's mailbox in retaliation.

Alternatively, you could use control-click-delete to make all the unwanted messages disappear immediately from your mailbox, silently avoiding any involvement in the discussion.

Which do you think makes more sense?

Lastly, let's consider e-mail that just aims to be entertaining without serving any organizational purpose. Some people like to share jokes, cartoons, amusing news stories, puzzles and the like with friends via e-mail. Some people enjoy receiving this kind of material. Some do not. If you like to send purely entertaining e-mail, you need to develop a personal mailing list of friends who you know enjoy receiving entertaining e-mails. If you send a joke or cartoon to everyone on an organizational distribution list, some of them are not going to be amused.

What do YOU think?

Has e-mail made your life easier? Harder? Downright unmanageable? Or are you one of those rare creatures who has chosen to live just fine off-line? How do you cope with the unstoppable e-influx, or how do you manage to live without it? Let your fellow readers know! Send your thoughts to Elizabeth Saas at ssierran@ix.netcom.com or at The Southern Sierran, c/o Angeles Chapter, 3250 Wilshire Blvd. #1106, Los Angeles, 90010.