Good Email-3

The use of email has definite social implications, although there isn't always agreement on what they are. Here are some views which seem to have currency in the literature:

1.     In the absence of such inter-personal communication cues as gestures, intonation, eye movement, and so forth, email communication is more easily misinterpreted than one might have predicted in the 1970's. This phenomenon added a new term, flaming, to our working vocabulary.

2.     Email can remove social distance as well as geographical distance as it suppresses status cues. This is both a blessing and a curse (see below).

3.     Email can support and sustain communities of interest.

4.     Email can be a weapon in organizational politics.

          To be sure, there is a healthy body of literature which speaks to a variety of other      social effects of email - in some cases, inconclusively. There is evidence that email communication may both produce and ameliorate anomic communication partnerships; email both contributes to and helps overcome the user's feeling of isolation; email is sometimes impersonal and sometimes not; and email may both increase and decrease sociability in communication. All of these are important areas of study, and equally beyond present purposes.

         Because of these benefits, the popularity of email soared. By some estimates, there are over 50 million email users, and that number appears to be growing by 25% per year. But this growth is not without discomfort