“on line” was the place mama hung wet laundry – how’s your “Netiquette” airing?

Yeah, those misplaced modifiers are still nagging at me –  and so is the glaring typo I didn’t see until after it went out in my headline.   However, the words on my mind at moment are those “lonely written words” we see on a computer screen when communicating electronically – words that both common sense  and research dictate are easily misinterpreted.

Until shortly before I met Sop, the idea of socializing electronically had never crossed my mind.  Although I did sleep with my laptop much of the year following Katrina, that’s hardly the sort of socializing that’s become so common to email, blogs, and social networking sites.

Unfortunately, my relationship with that laptop had an unhappy ending.  There is no help for a laptop that  falls off a bed, particularly one landing port side with a jump drive installed; however, for the more usual ways of socializing electronically, there is the option of  “netiquette training” :

E-mail is not meant to replace all human contact. E-mail is not meant to be your sole venue of communication… Use e-mail for the day to day stuff, but use your phone when the topic or situation requires for those whose relationships are of importance to you…That’s what real “friends” do!

My “relationship” with that laptop was an important one but we certainly weren’t “friends”.  However, while e-mail is not the only way I communicate with my employees, it is the way I manage the day to day operation of a business with over half the staff working at a distance from the main office.

Consequently, I didn’t need netiquette training or research to tell me the pitfalls of e-mail communication or have to rely on the gifted Learned Hand to know words are  “chameleons”  that “reflect the color of their environment”.

These words coming from my computer to the screen of thousands of readers, like those appearing on the screens of my far smaller number of employees, with be read with color added by a host of factors on the receiving end. Like chameleons, the color of these words will be changed by such factors as the reader’s mood and health.

Some will find my words useful and interesting, perhaps even thought-provoking.  Others may just be provoked – and in that sense the audience or form matters not.  Research points out the potential for conflict is inherent in e-mail, blogs and social networks using electronic communication that  is “purely textual”:

… meaning that people work with written words only, not the facial expressions inherent in face-to-face conversations or in video-conferencing, or the verbal nuances conveyed on the telephone.

the two parties are not co-present, but rather each reads…whenever desired and responds whenever desired. The result is not a conversation, but a series of intermittent, one-directional comments. It is possible for communications to be nearly instantaneous with e-mail, and thus close to synchronous, if the parties happen to be online
at the same time and choose to respond immediately. But, that is not typical. More likely, responses occur after hours or days.

Clark and Brennan (1991) provide a detailed description of differences across different communication media as part of their analysis of “grounding”– the process by which two parties in an interaction achieve a shared sense of understanding about a communication and a shared sense of participation in the conversation.

Grounding is important because “speech is evanescent…so Alan must try to speak only when he thinks Barbara is attending to, hearing, and trying to understand what he is saying, and she must guide him by giving evidence that she is doing just this”

In the midst of a heated discussion on SLABBED, it’s not unusual for someone to send an e-mail asking us to pull their comment from the blog.  Neither is it all that unusual to receive an angry comment from someone who just found the blog months after a discussion has ended.  Interestingly:

…as reliance on electronic forms of communications in our society increases, researchers who study conflict resolution and negotiation will devote more and more of their attention to studying this form of communication.

Friend of SLABBED and noted negotiator, Victoria Pynchon wrote of the “moment, a split second…[the]…finger hovers over the “send” button while a rational voice in my head says “no” and then pushing “send”, adding:

…social scientists have concluded that electronic communications are “profoundly a-social” and are more likely than not to be misconstrued…[and]…first impressions are extremely hard to overcome…[and]…there are “higher rates of escalation…than via face-to-face communication or other relatively rich media . . . such as telephone conversations.”

Her suggestion for those caught in electronically negotiating a dispute? “Sharing food releases the feel-good, trust building, bonding hormone oxytocin that will commence your negotiation in the best possible way leading to the best possible outcome”.

Although, I have no idea how it would work, I do suppose that one day it might be possible share food electronically. After all, there has to be a reason computers have “bites”.