Hello Everyone. My name is Peter, or Pete, I won’t actually notice the difference spoken verbally, but I will when it is typed out. I am a junior in communications, just transferred in last semester from the Hum Ec school where I was studying Nutrition. I am a pole vaulter on the Varsity track team here, which is very important because it takes like 20+ hours a week of my time. I am a hobby kind of person, probably because I grew up without television. So I’ve had tons of hobbies, but the one that I’m still doing at Cornell is carving/whittling. I am working on mass producing a couple of designs, and through the process I came up with something very interesting about the internet and social interactions with people.
When trying to contact retailers about giving me feedback on my designs, I wussed out. Instead of going in person like I planned, and talking to whoever the buyer for the shop was, I made a nice fancy, personalized email to each one, sent them out and got 0/17 responses. Nothing. This frustrated me a great deal because I didn’t get positive or negative responses, just nothing. I didn’t know how to continue, I didn’t know what to change, I just knew something about what I did, didn’t work, and did not motivate those I was contacting to respond to me.
I have decided to give up on that, and never try to get information or feedback from someone I have never met before, via email. All contacts of that sort must be made in person and then can be followed up with emails out of ease, but the relationship should be tangible and interpersonal. The phenomenon I have encountered and am very interested in, is the comfort I got in just sending and email, and avoiding the face to face, and also the comfort they got by just deleting my email and ignoring me, which would have been harder, face to face.
Wallace wrote the book well after email was established as a method of communicating and interacting socially, so she has it stuck pretty well as its own environment on the Web. She is quite right in that it is now an “indispensable technology”. I think all of us at Cornell respect that because as addicting as facebook is, or online gaming or any other internet environment that captures our attention, nothing affects me quite like having no access to my email. I feel lost and hopeless. I can see why it is so easy to use as a crutch for uneasy social interactions. The body language and tone of voice and so many other things that hold a lot of the “warmth” or “cold” in a conversation are lost, and so it feels much more neutral and less intimidating.
I feel like I intuitively know what the crutch is about substituting email for personal interaction, but I would like to know more and why it is so easy, so I can change myself or my emails to solve my problems, and open more doors.
1 comment:
At first, when I saw the title of your post, I thought that you would talk about email being a crutch in the sense of always feeling the need to check it and stay plugged in. I’m surprised that I hadn’t even initially considered the issue you raised. I am guilty of both sending emails because it was easier and less awkward and either deleting or ignoring them for the same reasons. Personally, I don’t like talking to people that I don’t know on the phone and would always rather send an email. I think there are a couple of factors that contribute to this. First, I think it’s important to note that since email is asynchronous. Email isn’t going to provide you with the immediate feedback (good or bad) that a face-to-face conversation or a synchronous chat would. In a sense, this makes it less risky. In your case, I’m sure someone rejecting the designs that you had created yourself and labored over in person would have felt worse than getting a negative response via email. Another benefit to emailing is that you can revise an email as many times as you want and spend time insuring that it contains all of the pertinent information you wish to include. You would get no such second chances in a face to face encounter.
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