新編大學(xué)英語第四冊(cè)u(píng)nit9 Text D: Lost in the E-mail

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UNIT 9 AFTER-CLASS READING 3; New College English (IV)

Lost in the E-mail

1 Charles Wang has been to e-mail hell, and returned to tell the tale. His journey there began innocently enough when, as chairman of Computer Associates International, a software company, he first heard how quickly his employees had embraced their new electronic-mail system. They were sending messages to one another like crazy. "I said, 'Wonderful,'" recalls Wang. "And I also said, 'Let's check into how people are using it.

2 But instead of a pleasant e-mail culture, what had evolved was a behavioral nightmare. "It was a disaster," he says. "My managers were getting 200 to 300 e-mails a day each. People were so fond of it they weren't talking to each other. They were hibernating, e-mailing people in the next room. They were abusing it." In just a few years, Wang's high-tech communications system had gone crazy.

3 To stop the insanity, Wang short-circuited the system, taking the astonishing step considering what his $3. 9 billion company does for a living of banning all e-mails from 9:30 a.m. to 12 noon and from 1:30 p.m. to 4 p.m. These hours are now rigidly observed as a sort of electronic quiet time. Says Wang: "It worked wonderfully. People are walking the corridors again talking to other people."

4 So much for the e-mail revolution, which is now enslaving all those employees it was supposed to free, creating communication problems so new that they cannot be found in the pages of any management textbook. E-mail has corrupted corporate cultures and created bosses who turn e-mail into a terror weapon to subdue underlings and undermine rivals. E-mail has wasted years of executive time and gigabytes of computer memory looking for lost keys.

5 And the volume of traffic is still exploding. In 1994, for example, 776 billion e-mail messages moved through U. S. -based computer networks. As of 1997 that number is expected to more than triple, to 2. 6 trillion. By the year 2000, the number will nearly triple again, to 6.6 trillion. Forty percent of the American workforce uses e-mail.

6 So why are people saying such bad things about these computer-borne text messages? Almost everyone agrees that e-mail is a wonderful invention. It is a convenient, highly democratic, informal medium for conveying messages that conforms well to human needs. E-mail is perhaps the ideal means by which one can run a global project. "It is one of the great innovations of the last 20 years," says Paul Argenti, a professor of management communications at Dartmouth's Tuck School. But Argenti and others also say it is a medium whose function is confusing, in part because the process is so easy and informal that people treat it as they do conversation. But informal as it may be, e-mail is writing and constitutes a permanent record. And because so much of human conversation is nonverbal, e-mail messages, especially critical or complex ones, can easily be misinterpreted.

7 That is especially true if the originator of the message is the "virtual manager". The virtual manager generally is a conflict-avoiding character who hides behind e-mail and uses it as an instrument of aggression, creating not only ill will but inefficiencies as well. "I cannot tell you how many people we've encountered hiding behind e-mail," says Emory Mulling, a consultant who is often brought in to help virtual managers change their ways. According to him, there are a lot of managers who do not like conflict, so they criticize their employees by e-mail, and often do more harm than good. In Mulling's opinion, e-mail is perfect for managers who would rather do anything other than walk down the hall.

8 Here is the sort of message, written with little thought as to how it will be read, that illustrates both the one-way nature of e-mail (the recipient can't immediately defend himself) and the dangers inherent in offering criticism in an electronic message:

You MUST MUST make your report titles more descriptive. If I can't understand what the report is about, how will our clients? You are evaluated on your ability to communicate clearly as much as you are on any other part of your performances.

9 By the time this message gets through the system, the sender has moved on to his next message. Meanwhile, the recipient stares at his screen as if the office had been struck by lightning. Here's how the recipient reads it: MUST MUST means you are an idiot"; evaluated, "soon to be fired". "The result is that if I send you an offensive e-mail, I feel great," says Mulling. "I've gotten something off my chest. But now you have to deal with the anger. It's a way of passing on anger." Another consequence is that the recipient, not knowing how to respond, may simply brood about it. "I've seen people upset for a week because of one thoughtless e-mail," says Monte Gibbs, 28, who has worked for IBM for several years.

10 In an era in which upper-level managers strive to push decision-making down the chain, e-mail has made it easier for middle managers to avoid responsibility by pushing decisions up the ladder. A worker who would shy away from seeking an appointment with the boss to resolve an issue often sends a "What do you think?" message on the most trivial of matters.

11 In many cases, there has been strong reaction against e-mail. "People became so overloaded they stopped using it," says Silicon Valley consultant Anita Rosen about the e-mail system at computer-software-maker Oracle, where she worked for years. "Out of 300 e-mails, 80% were ccs. So maybe all you actually need to know are 40 e-mails a day, or an hour's work." At the White House, the e-mail system is so overloaded that many senior staff members refuse to use it.

12 Sure, there are people like Bill Gates, who love to respond to several hundred of the e-mails sent to him daily. Monte Gibbs, however, does not appreciate having to deal with e-mails on his system until one in the morning. "I have been at the company two months and received 6,500 e-mails," he sighs.

13 There is no doubt that e-mail is abused and overused. There is an urgent need for traffic laws because what was once a wonderfully pleasant and speedy means of communication has now turned into an absurdly overcrowded system. To avoid sending the wrong message, there are four basic rules to obey: Never discuss bad news, never criticize and never discuss personnel issues over e-mail, and if there is anything ambiguous, walk down the hall to discuss it in person or pick up the phone.

14 "Think before you write," says Argenti. "The most important thing to know is what not to write." For American companies trying hard to keep pace with the e-mail revolution, that advice may be the best message of all. Cc it to everyone.