[iDC] Online silence and "infomania"

Wed Aug 29 14:36:34 UTC 2007

The etiquette here is fascinating.  As Hobbes called etiquette the "small
morals," I think it says a lot about the new types of hierarchies and coping
mechanisms prevailing on the net.

I love this account from n+1 Magazine <http://www.nplusonemag.com/>:

"*Correct emailing practice does not exist.* The true mood of the form is
spontaneity, alacrity—the right time to reply to a message is right away.
But do that and your life is gone. So you reject the spontaneous spirit of
email; you hold off replying for hours, days, even weeks. By then the
initiatory email has gone stale, and your reply is bound to be labored. You
compensate for the offense with a needlessly elaborate message. You ask
polite questions to which you pray there will never come an answer. Oh, but
there will."
***
"We too have sometimes been the have-nots in the email economy. In the role
of supplicant emailer, we have labored to achieve the impossible right tone:
so winning that others will have to write back, so casual you can pretend it
doesn't matter when they don't. The whole thing is painful all around. And
this, finally, is what must be understood: email, which presents itself as a
convenience, a breeze, is in fact a stern disciplinary phenomenon. You must
not stray too far from your desk. You must be polite, you must write back
soon. And yet in order to strike the right note, you must not write when too
giddy, angry, tired, or drunk. Always at the disposal of email, never,
except guiltily, at the disposal of your moods. . .* . It fits our phase of
capitalism: the collective attitude is casual, natural-seeming, offhand; the
discipline is constant and intense." (emphasis added)*

Indeed, as the book "Fast Food, Fast
Talk<http://books.google.com/books?id=QWE7GKaKaKQC&dq=&pg=PP1&ots=bg8RA7iKql&sig=YiphWtYil5KP0n1yV2QYSDBk_Mw&prev=http://www.google.com/search%253Fhl%253Den%2526q%253Dfast%252Bfood%252Bfast%252Btalk%2526btnG%253DGoogle%252BSearch&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title>"
relates, the "casual manner" may itself become a job requirement. . . .one
is disciplined to look like one is not disciplined.

I've tried to arrange an array of sources on these paradoxes of modern work
here<http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2007/08/philosophy_of_w.html>
.

One solution to the email problem is to have multiple accounts.  Another is
to require people to put certain "keywords" in their email....for instance,
I ask students who are writing papers for me to always put the word "paper"
in the subject header and the paper title somewhere in the body of the
text.  This is a good filtering mechanism.

I agree with your points about information
overload<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=888410>;
you might be interested in this retrospective
take<http://www.slate.com/id/2171128/nav/tap1/>on the problem.  David
Shenk, author of Data Smog, originally thought
info-overload insoluble, but now says "Google is just the most obvious
example of the extraordinary ingenuity coming from hardware, software, and
content creators. By and large, I am guilty of having vastly underestimated
these people in my book."

Gmail is my preferred way of sorting and keeping track of things, but I hate
the privacy sacrifices I have to make in order to use it.  Sadly, competitive
pressures seem to dictate that I use
it<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1002463>just in
order to keep up with the demands of students, journals, and
colleagues.

Good luck on the project!

--Frank

On 8/29/07, R Labossiere <admin at klooj.net> wrote:
>
>  I  know several people who simply don't reply (even if I think a reply is
> inferred) unless a reply is specifically requested. They seem to not "get"
> internet protocol. That leaves me feeling they are doing that "executive"
> thang, letting you know that in their scheme of importance, you don't rate.
> But thinking about it, I think, knowing these people to be friends and
> pretty nice people, that my feelings are fairly unjustified.
>
> In terms of infomania, the question might pivot on how one classifies
> incoming messages. Most email is not explicit, saying neither "please reply"
> nor "no reply required."
>
> We have learned certain behaviors in other media. Generally one returns
> phone calls because the assumption is that a person is calling you not to
> give you information but because they want to actually talk to you, to
> converse. If that's not the case, and they are leaving you a phone message,
> they'll usually say something like, "You don't need to call me back, just
> wanted you to know."
>
> By contrast, with snail mail letters, one rarely replies because generally
> the medium is used to deliver information, not to engage in conversation.
> The exceptions would be legal correspondence perhaps where there is a kind
> of recording/documentation of "positions" going on, or
> personal correspondence (love letters, belles lettres).
>
> Perhaps the issue of online silence is not really about the recipient and
> how they reply or don't reply, but about the sender. As a sender, I
> make assumptions: that the recipient will somehow just "know" how to
> respond; that email is more like the phone than snail mail; that email is
> for conversation, not information; that if I don't get a personal reply I am
> being snubbed.
>
> In fact, email is a hybrid medium, both letter and telephone, so there is
> more than one norm at work: some people apply the norm of letters, no reply
> unless specifically called for, and others the phone norm, reply because
> people want to engage in exchange. Given the vagaries, perhaps the email
> norm should be to be explicit if you want a reply. In fact, I might try
> testing this out on one person I know who seems to be particularly "thick"
> when it comes to knowing when I want to hear back and when I don't.
>
> I myself try to reply immediately or within 24 hours to personal mail. I
> don't reply to spam obviously, information messages from companies or
> organizations, cute or funny mail forwarded by friends, fyi mail from
> friends, or mail from strangers that is below some line of intelligence
> (like where they really have made no effort to learn what I do, so are
> emailing like a 'shot in the dark').
>
> Robert Labossiere
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>
> *From:* Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
> *To:* Yoram Kalman <Yoram.Kalman at gmail.com>
> *Cc:* iDC at mailman.thing.net
> *Sent:* Wednesday, August 29, 2007 7:55 AM
> *Subject:* Re: [iDC] Online silence and "infomania"
>
>
> Hi Yoram,
>
> I have a short comment on this, about the ethical aspects.
>
> Granted that we are all overloaded, and some more than others of course,
> is it not an ethical requirement to respond to one's peers? At least I
> attempt to directly answer every query, but if it requires extensive
> thought, I file it for later, where it may indeed lay fallow for quite a
> while, part of a 300+ to respond file which grows faster than I can respond
> to them.
>
> But at least, I think it is important to acknowledge reception. A good
> example is the automatic response by Richard Stallman, which I respect as an
> attempt to square the circle.
>
> Other people, who  do not respond at all, even if I can understand the
> reasons, create ill feelings, as it is as if 'you don't exist',
>
> Michel
>
> On 8/28/07, Yoram Kalman <Yoram.Kalman at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > In my first posting to this fascinating group, I would like to introduce
> > myself and my research interests, as well as suggest a topic for
> > discussion. I am a PhD student researching "online silence" at the
> > Center for the Research of the Information Society at The University of
> > Haifa. I am trying to define what online silence is, to understand what
> > causes online silence, and to explore the consequences of online
> > silence. In case you are wondering what I mean by online silence, the
> > best example is a situation in which you send an email, expect an
> > answer, and then days and days go by, and you do not receive an answer.
> > Ever occurred to you?  J
> >
> > One of my findings is that most email responses come very quickly, quite
> > often within a few hours, and that emails that are not answered within a
> > few days, are quite likely never to receive a response. I also found
> > that quite many of the cases of online silence reported by people, are
> > cases in which people intended to respond but did not do so immediately,
> > and this delay eventually turned into silence.
> >
> > In my research I speculate quite a lot about the reasons for this
> > asymmetric distribution of response times, and a recent paper published
> > in First Monday (link below) made me question the implications of this
> > asymmetry. I would be very interested in getting some perspectives from
> > this group about these implications. The paper focuses on "Infomania"
> > and describes the ever increasing pressure exerted on knowledge workers
> > who are trying to cope with an ever growing information (over)load, and
> > with the constant increase in frequency and obtrusiveness of
> > interruptions afforded by always-on, always-next-to-us communication
> > devices. Under these circumstances of an ever present flood of messages,
> > is it any wonder that we either provide an immediate answer, or hardly
> > respond at all?
> >
> > Link to article: http://snipurl.com/zeldes
> >
> > What I would like to do with the help of this group is to peek into the
> > future, and ask together with you a question about Infomania, and about
> > our increasing inability to respond to all of the messages we initially
> > intend to respond to. Are these temporary phenomena, or are they here to
> > stay? If online silence is a result of our inability to cope with
> > information overload and interruptions, what might improve this
> > situation? Will the solution come from culture? From technology? From a
> > change in the way our brains are wired? All of the above? None of the
> > above? Is this the first time humanity is facing such a challenge? Are
> > there important lessons from the past?
> >
> > Obviously, if you have other questions, comments or interesting
> > anecdotes about online silence, please send them too.
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > Yoram
> >
> > --
> > Yoram Kalman
> > Tel: +972 3 950 7340
> > Cell: +972 54 574 7375
> > www.kalmans.com
> >
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