R.S.V.P.

This is in response to an op-ed on nytimes.com by Rand Cooper: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/opinion/15cooper.html

I completely understand where Rand is coming from. I noticed something similar when I was the president of the CSUA. Between our weekly meetings, I used email to communicate about what we were doing. I hardly ever got a response. I couldn't understand it. I thought I was making it clear that I was expecting a response. Often, the email would consist of a question, but they were regularly ignored. Even repeated requests to respond didn't help. I tried not to take it too personally, but I definitely felt snubbed. The worst part was that it made it very difficult to get things done.

My theory is that it's become socially acceptable to not respond to emails. Many of us receive tons of emails every day. If we had to spend the time to respond to each one, we'd never have time for anything else. I'm not saying that I find it acceptable that email be treated this way, but if people are really receiving so many emails per day, it's inevitable that they give up on trying to respond to all of them.

To me, this is a symptom of an even deeper problem not having to do with people becoming more rude over time: email is cheap. By this I don't mean that technology has made it inexpensive to send letters to one another, although technology has something to do with it. What I'm more concerned about is how people regard email, and the effect this has on society.

Part of this has to do with how easy it is to send an email to multiple recipients. Many of us know someone who blindly forward pictures of cute kittens to everyone on their contact list without regard to whether people are actually interested in receiving such emails. This contributes to the phenomenon of overstuffed inboxes, which leads to the habit of ignoring emails. Once we realize that we just don't care about some emails, we begin to ignore them. Over time, this practice extends to other sorts of emails, such as those about social engagements, or running a club.

"Email is cheap" also means that we're not willing to spend much time on them. Some people seem to undergo grammar lobotomies prior to writing emails, because they don't don't even sound like themselves when they talk to you in person. In the extreme case, I've found people who distill their messages down to keywords until it reads like a PowerPoint presentation.

The "PowerPoint syndrome" isn't restricted to text-aholic teenagers. In fact, I've found it to be more of a problem with adults who seem to think it makes them sound more business-like. If that's the case, then it really says something about communication in corporate culture. Spending the time to write a thoughtful email somehow seems to be considered "inefficient". Again, this sort of thinking almost makes sense when we consider the fact that we receive too many emails per day, and that email is cheap. In an office setting, it's much less acceptable for emails to go unanswered, yet our work inboxes probably receive more email than our personal ones. The natural way of coping is to skimp on the contents of our emails.

Another problem is that its much to easy to blame missed emails on technological problems. Even if an email is successfully delivered, that doesn't mean that spam filters won't prevent the person from actually receiving it. Overstuffed inboxes also contribute to "missed" emails, whether they be honestly overlooked, or ignored under the cover of having been missed because of some technical mishap.

Unfortunately, I don't see these social changes in the way we communicate changing any time soon, unless we start to see them as pathologies, and not as "modern progress". I can easily imagine people reading Rand's piece and thinking, "This guy needs to keep up with the times. He's just too old fashioned!". That's almost certainly what the recipients of his last email were thinking, especially those who never ended up responding. It's almost paradoxical how technological advancement has lead to declines in our collective communication skills, but that seems to be what's happening.