“But some people believe that email is more formal, more dishonest and more calculated, and this affects the ways they send and interpret email messages”. I disagree with part of this statement, but it struck me when I was reading this paper. Email may be more formally calculated, but generally we use it to communicate more formally. However, I think that we sometimes put just as much effort into our texting as we do email.
Very interesting that even before we had a lot of medium to communicate in, people still chose to be outraged not at the fact that their relationship was ending, but at how that person chose to end the relationship. Does this mean that when we break up with someone, the reasons behind the break up matter less (at least with respect to our lasting impressions of the breakup) than the manner in which the breakup is done? I would be interested to hear whether people who had more ‘positive’ break ups (less antagonistic?) felt the same way.
“You could delete an email or a voicemail, but texts require both attention and a response.” When put this way, I realize that I agree with what the author is saying, but I am not very sure why email is so different than text, especially now that we have both in the same place (smartphones). The author talks later about how we acquire these sensibilities and here I think is the best place for discussion. The example that comes to mind immediately is how my parents and my extended family user and communicate on Facebook compared to how most people in my generation do. We were socialized to Facebook’s methods and communication at younger ages and have been using it longer, but by now our parents have been using it for years as well. Yet we have different standards of communication and there are subtle ways that our communication varies based on it being, for example, a public post vs a private message.
No comments:
Post a Comment