This Email Could've Been a Meeting

Thoughts on a vexing medium

Ideas being conveyed without the benefit of non-verbal cues

It’s been hard for me to write big-picture stuff here this week, partly because I’m giving a talk this afternoon based on the book-in-production and needed to prep that, and partly because of a bunch of general running-around that needed doing. Another big chunk, though, has been that a lot of my mental processing cycles have been consumed by drama on the faculty email list. I can’t talk about the details of that, for obvious reasons, but since I’m having trouble shifting away from the topic, I’ll attempt to say some general things about email as a bafflingly problematic medium.

For context, I should note that I’m really old in Internet terms (and in real life, if you ask my kids). When I give talks about social media for science communication, I joke that my blogging career is best understood via a paleontological analogy: I’m a bit too young to really be a dinosaur, but originate more in the period of the giant armored sloths. Something similar holds for the Internet generally— I’ve been online more or less continuously since 1992 or thereabouts, very active on Usenet through the 90’s, transitioning to blogs in 2002, and expanding to Facebook and Twitter and a tiny bit of Instagram after that. (I draw the line at TikTok, though…)

That represents a lot of time communicating with other people through primarily text-based electronic media. As such, I tend to really like email as a medium, and find it an attractive alternative to in-person meetings. The fundamentally asynchronous nature of email is one of the best points— I don’t have to free up any particular block on my schedule, but can respond to things whenever I have time, which is way better for me given the number of side hustles I have going on. It also afford me the opportunity to carefully craft and edit my response in ways that can’t be done live, allowing me the best possible chance of conveying my actual point, and also trimming things down so I get to the actual point in a reasonably efficient way.

As a result, I am consistently puzzled by what an utter fucking catastrophe email is as a medium for faculty business. For one thing, some sizable number of people simply refuse to have anything to do with it, which I find mind-boggling since it’s been around for nigh on thirty years now. Some people just will not respond to anything at all in email (or any other electronic forum) and will only provide feedback in person. Leading to the maddening phenomenon where I send an email to a group of people with a request for specific information, and then a few days later have to go to each of their offices in turn to actually get their answers.

More than that, though, people are just disastrously bad at reading and replying to email. A lot of this is just a kind of lack of completion— I’ll send an email with three questions in it, and get back an answer to just the first one. Or I’ll send email saying that I’m doing a particular thing in a particular manner, and get replies asking questions that were clearly answered in the original message. This is especially frustrating given that I’m mostly sending these messages to people with Ph.D.’s, whose entire jobs revolve around processing text.

But the biggest problem by far is with hostile misreadings and miscalibrated comments. People regularly take what seem like pretty clear and relatively anodyne comments and interpret them uncharitably in ways I find baffling. Or they’ll write things that to me read as obviously and incredibly insulting to other people in the conversation, but seem utterly oblivious to the effect of their words. Again, this is a community full of people who parse text for a living, which makes it really hard for me to understand how a text-based medium can so consistently go so wrong.

Whenever I say something like this, I get replies of the form “Well, you know, text strips out all the non-verbal elements of communication, so this is just inherent to the medium.” I don’t really buy that, though, because, again, I’ve been doing this for nigh on thirty years, and I manage just fine. I have friends I interact with almost entirely online, and we communicate just fine via text. I met my wife through Usenet, and we spent months successfully flirting via email before we ever got together in person.

More than that, though, humans have been communicating via text, without non-verbal cues, literally for millennia. The idea of conveying meaning, even relatively subtle shades of meaning, via words alone isn’t some shocking new Internet-era practice, it’s been going on at least since Ea-Nasir was selling substandard copper ingots. Scholarly communities have been created and bound together by the written word for centuries, famous epic romances have been conducted largely through the mail, and so on. And yet, when it’s mediated by computers, otherwise smart people just go haywire.

It’s also not really true that people are wildly different online than in person. Again, this goes back to my Usenet days— twenty-mumble years ago, we used to have somewhat regular get-togethers with people from the newsgroup, and with very few exceptions the people who were most prolific online were also big talkers in person. There are some notable examples of mild-mannered people who have adopted radically different personae online, but they’re notable because they’re rare. For the most part, the people who send a lot of emails also talk a lot in meetings, and those who keep quiet in person tend not to be big talkers in email, either.

So I really don’t understand what the problem is. If I had to guess, I’d say that the apparent immediacy of the medium creates a false impression of informality— that is, because messages can be sent and received (almost) in real time, people treat email more like a live conversation than a letter. As a result, they don’t take advantage of the fundamental asynchronicity of the medium to stop and consider what they’re reading, and how what they’re saying will be read, but instead make ill-considered snap responses. I’ve fallen prey to this myself— the worst email-list blowups I’ve been involved in have been in cases where I tried to dash off a message in a hurry, between other things.

The hell of it is that in principle, email would be so much better for a great many things that we end up having to do in meetings instead. “This meeting could’ve been an email” is a meme for good reason— far too often we’re forced to block out time in which to hear people present information that could be conveyed more efficiently in a document to be read at leisure, and solicit live feedback on issues that would benefit from additional time to reflect and consider. Somehow, though, when the conversation is mediated by GMail, everybody’s brains short-circuit and it ends in disaster.

As a Megatherium of the Internet, I keep holding out hope that this is a transient effect, that people will eventually get accustomed to electronically mediated text communication and we will finally be able to do things better. It’s been geological ages, though, and I’m starting to despair. While I firmly believe that better things are possible, I’m slowly sliding into the place where I look at my inbox and think “I wish this email had been a meeting instead.”

---

There’s your dose of “Old Man Yells At Cloud” for the week. If you enjoy this, and would like to receive additional shouting at atmospheric phenomena, here’s a button you can click:

If you’d like to share this specific shouty bit with someone else, here’s a different button:

And if you’d like to explain to me the inadequacy of text as a medium for communication, you can either make or negate your point by typing it into the comments.