Do you watch NCIS (Tuesday on CBS)? It’s one of my favorite shows and last night one thing really cracked me up. Without going into too much detail, there was a crisis and the young FBI agent notified her boss about it by email. It was sensitive, urgent information affecting a critical investigation and she sent an email; needless to say, her boss wasn’t pleased—but it was played for a good laugh.

I’ve written several times, and linked to pertinent articles and research, about the problems inherent communicating by email and now there’s more. A recent NY Times article explains that, “This [email exacerbating misunderstandings] is becoming more apparent with the emergence of social neuroscience, the study of what happens in the brains of people as they interact. New findings have uncovered a design flaw at the interface where the brain encounters a computer screen: there are no online channels for the multiple signals the brain uses to calibrate emotions. Face-to-face interaction, by contrast, is information-rich. We interpret what people say to us not only from their tone and facial expressions, but also from their body language and pacing, as well as their synchronization with what we do and say. Most crucially, the brain’s social circuitry mimics in our neurons what’s happening in the other person’s brain, keeping us on the same wavelength emotionally….In an article to be published next year in the Academy of Management Review, Kristin Byron, an assistant professor of management at Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management, finds that e-mail generally increases the likelihood of conflict and miscommunication.”

Email can be useful for sharing information, arranging meetings and other one dimensional actions, but beyond that, you’re looking for trouble.

“Consider, too, the “e-mail the guy down the hall” effect: as the use of e-mail increases in an organization, the overall volume of other kinds of communication drops – particularly routine friendly greetings. But lacking these seemingly innocuous interactions, people feel more disconnected from co-workers. This was noted in an article in Organizational Science almost a decade ago, just as e-mail was starting to surge. Saying “Hi,” it turns out, really does matter; it’s social glue. “

What about the rest of the social media world, stuff such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.? Professor Clay Shirky, adjunct professor in New York University’s interactive telecommunications program, whose expertise is social computing – software programs through which multiple users interact, ranging from Facebook to Listservs and chat rooms to e-mail says, “social software” like e-mail “is not better than face-to-face contact; it’s only better than nothing.”

Got that? Better than nothing. That’s not saying much for the medium that’s being treated as the solution to your business (and even personal) ills, when, in fact, it might enhance, but it doesn’t replace either in-person visits or phones.

Think about it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Business info, Communication, Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.