Dealing with contention through computer media - the tone of your emails

Our everyday experience of email is one of mixed feelings. Email can be great. It is fast, convenient, easy to refer to, accessible from just about anywhere in the world. Unfortunately, its use can also be awkward and unpleasant. It is fast (replies can be sent too quickly), inconvenient (casual remarks are brought back to haunt us as promises), and has an unpredictable rhythm (batteries fail on a laptop, wireless goes down, the message recipient doesn't reply when expected). Tone = Emotional Force Possibly the hardest thing of all about email is to judge the 'tone' of messages, or statements within messages. It is easy to say that it is hard to do this because we don't get to see, for example, the smiles or the frowns that accompany the harsh black-and-white of text-on-screen. Certainly, the loss of non-verbal signals is a part of the problem - even with the benefit of smilies ;-> - However, interpretation of what is meant by any message relies on an understanding of the conversation. The tone of the conversation gives us grounds for reading the tone of a message Read on … tags:poetry communication Tags: