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From The Faculty Chair
In some sense, it is the ultimate irony. We at MIT played an important part in inventing the Internet, yet many of us at times feel overwhelmed by the burden of keeping up with its demands. This is particularly the case with e-mail that arrives incessantly, increasing the demands of everyone to communicate with everyone else. One hears the same complaint both among our faculty and elsewhere that the quantity of e-mail demanding our attention has added to, rather than reduced, the time demands of work.
This dilemma came upon us suddenly, and there has been little time to adapt work styles and customs to accommodate these increased demands. Part of the problem is that e-mail hasn't completely replaced a previous medium of communication; rather, it has mostly been yet another one that is faster and cheaper for some purposes. We find ourselves working on our e-mail late at night to avoid falling further behind the next day.
Yet another aspect of e-mail is the ease with which large numbers of people can be drawn into a correspondence. Given that the university is going to have the infrastructure to support universal e-mail access anyway, the marginal cost of copying large numbers of people on a message is essentially zero. The positive side of this is that each of us is much more informed about various things going on at MIT than we would have been when memoranda had to be photocopied and mailed. The dark side, however, is that we tend to exercise far less restraint when we add people to the copy list on electronic mail. Making matters worse, each recipient may feel obliged to respond to the original message, creating a cascade of e-mail about something that really isn't worth the time and energy.
Lest you view this piece as the work of a technological Luddite, I am a strong advocate for e-mail when used with some restraint. During the 1980's I was deeply involved in Project Athena, which had the side effect of expanding the community of e-mail users at MIT from the small set of computer scientists to the entire community. E-mail has vastly reduced the incessant telephone tag that used to go on, and I am much more aware of research developments in my fields of interest as a result of electronic communications. However, even during the early phases of Project Athena, it became clear that e-mail (and other immediate electronic communications mechanisms such as instantaneous messaging) wasn't the right medium for all communications.
We need to develop social norms and some common sense rules of thumb about how this particular medium can serve us best. As with many things, the development of widely accepted social norms about a new technology takes more time than the spread of the technology requires. Not surprisingly, we find ourselves in an era when cyberspace has much of the feeling of the American frontier; it's dynamic and exciting, but only marginally civilized.
The key to taming this new frontier is for all of us to become more conscious about what works well with e-mail and related media and what doesn't. Based on my own experiences and those of colleagues, I have some concrete suggestions that might help.
Very early during the Project Athena development process, we discovered that e-mail is a terrible medium for resolving any dispute. Over and over again those of us managing the project would observe very minor disagreements escalate into massive electronic confrontations through a series of increasingly inflammatory e-mail messages. This same phenomenon was reported elsewhere and can still be seen almost everywhere e-mail is used. It has given rise to the terms "flame" (meaning the initial complaint) and "flame wars" (meaning the vociferous e-mail exchanges that the initial flame induces).
E-mail generates flame wars, because it in some ways combines the features that probably make it the worst possible way, short of physical violence, for two parties to reach amicable agreement. This happens for three reasons:
We may eventually learn to use e-mail more effectively in dispute resolution. However, at least for now, I propose a very simple rule. Never try to resolve any contentious issue through e-mail. Instead, pick up the phone or, even better, meet face to face with the people involved. This approach may appear at first glance to be more time consuming, but the truth is that the time needed to resolve a vastly escalated dispute can be many times that needed to resolve the initial dispute without e-mail.
Another entire aspect of e-mail that many are unaware of is its almost complete lack of security. The message you send from your computer is much more like a postcard than something sealed in an envelope. Even someone with little technical skill can install software that examines the contents of e-mail messages as they are transmitted across the Internet. In addition, there is essentially no guarantee that a message you receive purporting to be from someone actually came from them; forging an e-mail message is fairly simple. I propose two simple rules to deal with this. Never send anything by e-mail you wouldn't want someone other than the recipient to see, and never assume that an e-mail message comes from where it says it does without checking with the purported sender.
As an interesting aside, the technology exists to resolve both of these problems. While there are some complexities associated with implementing it campus-wide (and even more implementing it for all Internet communications), we could use encryption and digital signatures in a way that would make e-mail more secure than its paper-based counterpart. This would require, however, that we adopt campus-wide standards for e-mail systems, reducing the high degree of flexibility in our software choices.
Another aspect of e-mail is the disturbing tendency of people to send copies of things to large groups. The existence of mailing lists further exacerbates this problem. It is simply too easy to "cc" everyone you know. My proposed rule for dealing with this is somewhat more complicated than my earlier ones. Remember that the criterion for selecting who should get a copy of an e-mail isn't based on how easy it is for you to send the message, but rather the time needed by the recipients to read it. We all need to balance the value of the information we are sending someone against the time it will take the recipients to process it. This is the reason I try to limit the number of messages sent to the mailing list that includes the entire faculty.
My final message relates to setting reasonable expectations about turnaround times on electronic messages. The very speed with which e-mail can be sent and received has escalated users' expectations about how quickly a response to an inquiry will be sent. One faculty member cited an instance in which an electronic correspondent was outraged because he failed to respond to an e-mail message by the afternoon of the day it was sent. After all, argued the correspondent, the message arrived in the morning and had been sitting on the recipient's computer for several hours. In the era of paper mail, no one had any such expectations, and a response within a few days was seen as the hallmark of a diligent correspondent. The unreasonable assumption that every e-mail message will get a response in just hours has led many of us to be constantly checking our e-mail, often several times per day. We need to restore a more sensible expectation that, except for dire emergencies, e-mail will be answered about as quickly as paper mail messages.
I do believe that many of the stresses that e-mail intensifies will be resolved over time by emergence of accepted social conventions that better fit with busy schedules. This should allow most of us to see e-mail as less a cause of time-related stress and more as a contributor to real productivity. We might all contribute to the early arrival of that time by acknowledging the limitations of e-mail as a medium and adapting our use of it to serve us better.
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