Facebook's Messages May Not Be Right Answer But Is the Right Question
Facebook unveiled its new correspondence system, Messages, and there are lots of different responses, including the one that always dogs anything Facebook: how will this new Facebook app invade our privacy? That's an important question to ask and I need to do more research but, even before we get there, I want to at least applaud Facebook for asking the right question about whether email really is sustainable. There has to be a better way. I hope some powerful engine other than Facebook takes up the challenge; Facebook's Messages may not be the answer. But they are definitely asking the right question about why we are all settling for email as presently constituted. Email has changed very little since 1994 when it was widely commercialized. It's never been rethought in structural, social terms according to what we know about human communication styles and workplace efficiencies. There has to be a better way. Facebook's Messages at least is acknowledging there is a problem.
Here's the Messages url: http://www.facebook.com/about/messages/ And here is a story about Facebook's assault on email and also AOL's plans to overhaul email: http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/11/15/am-aol-announc...
Whether or not Messages or AOL solves the email problem, it is time we all acknowledge that email is a disaster. it's the kind of transitional invention that, a decade or two from now, people will look back on and laugh. It's a little like the VCR of the digital age, in that the VCR performed a function we all wanted (to be able to record from the tv and play back later) but the mechanics of the VCR were so clunky, the image so lousy, the functionality so limited that it was only a matter of time before a better system evolved. Email too. How can any system survive that puts spam, recipes from Aunt Emma, a memo from the HR department, an emergency notice from your son's teacher about his truancy, and workflow all in the same inbox, without differentiation? That's just crazy to think that people who have been trained for the last 150 years by the Industrial Age's mandate of separating the functions of work, home, leisure, play, business, religion, family, sexuality, social life, entertainment, and so forth would be happy with an email system that merges all of those together in one undifferentiated inbox again.
Nor have we evolved even the most rudimentary protocols for answering. There is no "norm" for how long one should take to answer an email and some people get huffy if an hour goes by without a response, others think a week is fine. There isn't even a standardized business form of address: "Dear Mr. [Boss]"? "Hi Mr [Boss["? "[Boss]"? Insert Name Here. We have no idea how to personalize, how to address whom. Nor do we know how to close. Is the annoying (mine is one of the worst offenders) "signature" file that lists all your titles, contact information, and various url's at the end of each email a necessity that prevents multiple follow-up emails about where your website is, where to send the package, who to call--or is it a total nuisance (everyone seems passionate about one or the other--but which is the case)?
People used to train at business schools to master the etiquette of the business letter (date on line 15) but now every email has and implicitly requires its own etiquette. It is as if every time one were served a meal at a restaurant one had to reach into a large box of eating implements and choose which fork was exactly the right one, with no guide and with different expectations about how big or little a faux pas it would be to choose the wrong one.
Email's got to go--and it will. It doesn't work in structural, communicative, interactive ways that we need and it causes confusion and overwork rather than efficiency. I'm not sure at all that Facebook's Messages is the answer. Or that AOL will give us the best way to direct information flow into and out of our email inboxes either. But I know we all want a good answer to the question: What is a better system for communicating with one another in the digital age?
- Cathy Davidson's blog
- Login or register to post comments
I think that Facebook may be asking a good question...
...but I'm not sure that your reasoning behind why Messages is a step in the right direction completely makes sense. I think that people misuse email, but there are genre conventions.
Full thoughts: http://behzodsirjani.com/blog/2010/a-letter-to-professor-cathy-davidson/
Response to Behzod Sirjani's excellent comment
Dear Behzod Sirjani, Thank you for this thoughtful reply to my post on your blog: http://behzodsirjani.com/blog/2010/a-letter-to-professor-cathy-davidson/. I actually do think that Messages--on a conceptual level--is designed to constrain the flow of email into inboxes, so one can weed out those one does not wish to hear from. That does not solve the whole problem but I simply cannot believe that, in the next decade, we won't all be using email that learns our preferences and presorts what comes into our boxes.
I happen to be, personally, a pretty fast email responder and I know from Duke stats that I get and send more email than just about anyone, even in the high user category, so this isn't so much about me personally. However, many of my students are so disgusted by it that they will barely even look at email any more. In its present incarnation, it has no conventions, no sorting mechanisms, no clear expectations or protocols. That can cause chaotic responses. A very famous technology designer I once did a project with told me that, because of email, most business people now spend more not less time in face to face than previously, because email’s conventions are so underdeveloped that people are constantly misunderstanding one another and need face to face time to reestablish trust so common projects can go on. A linguist once quipped that people send email as conversation and read it as text--that we have looser sociolinguistic rules in our head about what constitutes a good email when we send it than we do when we read it. I don't know if I agree with that but it is a fascinating insight, that because email is not colocated, the conventions of the speech act are not constrained but left to interpretation, more so than in face-to-face interaction.
I have nothing against email except that it is very crude in its manner of presorted delivery and is still rudimentary in its politeness forms, leading to lots of miscommunication, especially crossculturally where norms can already be strained. Will Messages solve these problems? No. But it does make some attempt to put sort functions into one’s inbox and, in that, is asking the right questions. Thanks so much for your very thoughtful and thought-provoking remarks.
Best, Cathy Davidson
Perhaps I don't disagree that much...
Professor Davidson,
Thank you for your response. I definitely agree that the type of work that Messages is doing (as well as Gmail Priority inbox and a number of other types of filtration systems) are valuable for the email environment. I just am not convinced that implementing these tools in Facebook will help to better construct the genre of email. Though, as you seem to hope, perhaps these types of things will become more commonplace in non-Facebook email as we move forward.
In regards to your example of email in the corporate world, I can completely agree that many executives spend too much time on email and then face-to-face in redundant loops. However, I'm not sure that is email's fault. Many people like to claim that PowerPoint (or slideware to be specific) is a worthless tool and is responsible for bad presentations. The problem with this argument is that you are blaming the tool. People who use slideware ineffectively and give bad presentations are doing just that. PowerPoint itself can be an extremely valuable tool, but the norms and customs that many people have learned cause many people to groan when a PowerPoint deck appears at a presentation. These problems don't mean we need to necessarily move beyond PowerPoint, but that we need to re-establish the genre and teach best practices, rather than expect it to be used as a crutch during presentations. I'm sure you could ask your friend about the hours that executives spend adding fluffy animations to slide decks, or putting their entire reports on a slide. These two are time-consuming tasks, but are not the fault of slideware.
Returning to the notion of email, it is clear we need smarter systems that (like most technologies IMHO) should learn from each individuals' use. So perhaps I don't disagree with you all that much, I just don't agree with how you got to your conclusion. Thank you again for your response, and allowing me to stretch my brain a bit.
Best,
Behzod Sirjani