Email and your brain
by Miki SaxonEmail. Whether you love it or hate it, in the business world, you’re stuck with it.
Granted, it has some valid uses in terms of basic sharing of information, but it’s not a time sensitive form of communication, it’s definitely not a good management tool, it seems that many people are super sensitive to how you sign-off, and what the younger workforce sees as acceptable communications is downright scary.
But the single, most disastrous, part of email is the speed with which people click “send.” Jobs lost, business deals derailed, and friendships destroyed—all because emails are rarely reread, let alone rethought.
Since email’s inception, there’s been much research to determine why people so blithely communicate in emails that which they would never speak aloud, let alone write on paper.
An article in the NYTimes discusses what the experts call “disinhibition” and comments that, “This work points to a design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain’s social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well.”
The research described is interesting, but it focuses completely on the differences between face to face and virtual communications and places the problem on the lack of visual clues.
I’m not disagreeing, but, in the centuries before email, there was still communications between people who weren’t face to face, with far longer periods between writing and feedback, but they didn’t suffer from this social disconnect. Why?
Because they were forced to consciously think while physically writing, even when they were angry or in a highly emotional state. They might be screaming out loud or crying bitterly, but in order to put pen to paper they had to think and to form the letters carefully enough to be read by another; even when messages were typed, they appeared on paper, and that paper needed to be taken from the machine, folded and placed in an envelope or in a fax, addressed and sent.
All this gave time for reflection, unlike the print in an email, which has no life in the real world. I’ve always found that one of the great side benefits of enabling spell-check in your email program is that it adds a minute or so of conscious thought to what you’ve written.
Maybe it’s time to update the old adage, “Be sure the brain is engaged before the mouth is in gear” to “Be sure brain is engaged before clicking send.”
