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liability related to the “ease and informality” of e-mail use, employees’ “non-business use” of e-
mail, “cost of maintenance, back-ups, and restores,” “retention of e-mail, disk space and legal
liability,” and problems with “document management.”
At a substantive, rather than technical, level, the ease of sending e-mail may lead people
to send messages about relatively unimportant matters, thereby undermining the credibility of
this method of communication on the whole. One respondent complained of “people emailing
with simple questions they should have figured out by reading the web site,” while another found
that “vague questions” were hard to answer. Furthermore, some respondents felt that e-mail was
an incomplete substitute for other, often more effective, methods of communication. As one
respondent put it, “we stop talking with one another in person or by phone and rely on e-mail. E-
mail has become a way to avoid dealing with issues. Another issue is the blanket copying that
takes the place of conversation or becomes a method of attack.” A city councilmember’s staffer
stated, “E-mail does not convey indicators like tone of voice, emotion, etc. Sometimes this is a
good thing, but sometimes the message may not get across in the intended fashion.” A recent
book, entitled You Send Me, discusses how e-mail has affected the English language as well as
norms of communication. In addition to concurring that e-mail is often used to avoid social
interaction while giving the appearance of “connecting” with others, the author contends that the
medium “encourages language that sounds nasty, brutish, and short,” and often comes across as
less civil than other forms of communication (The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, 2003). Thus, e-
mail may be more likely to be misinterpreted negatively than other types of communication,
even those that are also written, rather than spoken.
Spam and viruses might be described as the twin plagues of e-mail users. As expected,
several of the respondents complained that one or both of these undesirable forms of e-mail were
Convention