Daniel Goleman on email communication

[Peter Howie]

Dear Steven,

This is an interesting article and worth passing on.

However it appears to contain what I consider a fundamental flaw 
which I am not sure is a philosophical one or simply ignorance. He 
states it in a couple of points:

"The typed words are denuded of the rich emotional context we convey 
in person or over the phone."
&
"But when we send e-mail, there's little to nothing by way of 
emotional valence to pick up. E-mail lacks those channels for the 
implicit meta-messages that, in a conversation, provide its positive 
or negative spin."

This assertion of his, and I have seen it many times in email forums, 
is not to my knowledge based on research.

It appears to more based on a logical conjecture which I have come to 
consider as specious. It assumes a number of things of which I am 
making up a few here and there are probably many others. It assumes 
1) that email writing is not coloured by a person's character 2) that 
email writing is not sufficiently coloured by a person's character 
that anyone else would notice 3) there is such as thing as neutral 
email writing 4) that email writing conveys only information of a 
particular sort of data-like-ness - as though the sender is only an 
automaton 5) obviously that email writing is different from other 
writing 6) that context doesn't effect the reading of an email 7) 
that previous emails don't effect current emails 8) that dry writing 
of the supposedly possible neutral kind is unlikely to produce big 
emotional responses 9) That strong emotions can not be projected 
through a few words 10) That strong emotions can't be effected by 
reading a few words 11) ...... And probably others.

My experience is that email writing is like other forms of discourse 
- it is all about timing, context, interpretation, use of this word 
over that word and the inferences this bring forth in others. It is 
in fact because of the earlier assumptions about neutral and 
unemotional emails that have no meta-communicative qualities, and 
Goleman also makes this assumption, that have led to this wonderment 
at how things can so badly wrong.

Cheers for now

Peter Howie
Brisbane
Australia

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