Some recent activity on a "professional" (yes, those are Dr. Evil style quotation marks) listserv brought to my mind the early days of email. A few things were posted on the list that were obviously not meant to be shared with the entire group. Worse yet, several increasingly mean spirited replies followed and, not for the first time, I found myself weighing the costs and benefits of being affiliated with this group. Because it was obvious that some of the comments I am complaining about were sent through smart phones (I am letting that go without the quotation marks because I think the phones are plenty smart, it is the owners who fail), I think a few things, not necessarily good things, facilitate these negative exchanges. First, the fact that people are now carrying their email around and, unfortunately, monitoring it all of the time, means that immediate and not well thought out responses are possible. The nature of even the best phone still encourages relatively brief responses which often leave a lot of room for interpretation/misinterpretation. I also think screen size and placement of windows sometimes allows people to forget who they are replying to - and things go out to the entire list that should have instead been included in a reply or forward to one or a select group of people. What this brought to my mind was the often repeated caution from the early days of email: "think before you hit send." It seemed for a time that a lot of people became more cautious - I know I did - and saved drafts that were eventually deleted, or if sent, incorporated the improvements that time and reflection might bring. I am sorry to see the bad old days of firing off instant, thoughtless responses are neither forgotten or gone.
"Still liFe with smart phone" - above -Lumix camera and Photo Studio software for effects.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI am Sheryl L. Chatfield, Ph.D, C.T.R.S. I am a member of the faculty in the College of Public Health at Kent State University. I also Co-coordinate the Graduate Certificate in Qualitative Research and I am a member of the Design Innovation Team at Kent State. Archives
February 2024
Categories
|