rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo) (12/23/85)
PSYCHOLOGY "DISCOVERS" FLAMING [Next they'll claim they invented it!]
Here's an amusing article on flames, those impetuous, ill-advised and
wonderful by-products of electronic mail technology. It was forwarded
to the "english" mailing list here at work.
Implement extremism!
Out of the locker room,
& into the nets!
[From The New York Times, Tuesday, October 2, 1984, p. C1]
EMOTIONAL OUTBURSTS PUNCTUATE CONVERSATIONS BY COMPUTER
by Erik Eckholm
Computer buffs call it "flaming." Now scientists are documenting
and trying to explain the surprising prevalence of rudeness,
profanity, exultation and other emotional outbursts by people when
they carry on discussions via computer.
The frequent resort to emotional language is just one of several
special traits of computer communications discovered by behavioral
scientists studying how this new medium affects the message.
Observing both experimental groups and actual working
environments, scientists at Carnegie-Mellon University are comparing
decision-making through face-to-face discussions with that conducted
electronically.
In the experiments, in addition to calling each other more names
and generally showing more emotion, people "talking" by computer took
longer to agree, and their final decisions tended to be more extreme,
involving either greater or lesser risk than the more
middle-of-the-road decisions reached by groups meeting in person.
Curiously, those who made such decisions through electronic
give-and-take believed more strongly in the rightness of their
choices.
As small computers proliferate in offices and homes, more business
discussions that were once pursued face-to-face, by telephone or on
paper are now taking place by way of keyboards and video display
terminals. With electronic mail, messages are left in a central
computer for reading by correspondents on their own computers at their
own convenience. Computer conferences can be carried on
simultaneously or not.
In some offices, observers say, the traditional typed memorandum
is all but extinct, and computer mail is replacing even telephone
calls. Employees in one corporation studied received or sent an
average of 24 computer messages a day.
The unusual characteristics showing up in computer communications
should not be seen as entirely negative, say the researchers. When it
is not insulting, language that is uninhibited and informal helps to
bridge social barriers and may help to draw out some people's ideas.
And more extreme decisions can be innovative and creative instead of
foolish.
Moreover, members of groups talking electronically tend to
contribute much more equally to the discussion.
"This is unusual group democracy," said Dr. Sara Kiesler, a
psychologist at Carnegie-Mellon. "There is less of a tendency for one
person to dominate the conversation, or for others to defer to the one
with the highest status."
LOOSER STANDARDS FOR DISCUSSIONS
Studies of electronic mail in several Fortune 500 corporations
have confirmed the tendency for people to use more informal and
expressive language on the computer than when communicating in person,
by telephone or by memo.
"Whatever the company's pre-existing standards for the expression
of opinion, electronic mail seems to loosen them," Dr. Lee Sproull, a
sociologist at Carnegie-Mellon, said in an interview, But in contrast
with the experimental findings, in the corporate world positive
emotional expressions greatly outnumbered negative ones.
The company studies also indicate that computers are permitting
much wider participation in discussions than in the past, with
employees far from headquarters now able to follow debates and make
their views known.
Unusually expressive language has been one of the most striking
characteristics of computer discussions studied in many different
contexts. "It's amazing," said Dr. Kiesler. "We've seen messages sent
out by managers -- messages that will be seen by thousands of people
-- that use language normally heard in locker rooms."
COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS
The frequent use of exuberant and offensive terms has long been
noted by observers of computer bulletin boards. In 1982 the Defense
Communications Agency, which manages the world's oldest and largest
computer network for use by Pentagon employees and contractors, issued
the following message to potential bulletin board contributors: "Due
to past problems with messages deemed in bad taste by 'the
authorities,' messages sent to this address are manually screened
(generally, every couple of days) before being remailed to the
Boards."
Struggling to explain the free-wheeling language that people use
on computers, the Carnegie-Mellon scientists note that electronic
communications convey none of the non-verbal cues of personal
conversation -- the eye contact, facial expressions and voice
inflections that provide social feedback and my inhibit extreme
behavior. Even a memo, with its letterhead and chosen form, carries
more nonverbal information than does a message on a screen. Also, no
strong rules of etiquette for computer conversation have yet evolved.
Computer writers often become deeply engrossed in their message,
the researchers have found, but their focus tends to be on the text
itself rather than their audience, perhaps another consequence of the
lack of non-verbal feedback.
In a forthcoming paper, Dr. Kiesler and three colleagues posit
that "using computers to communicate draws attention to the technology
and to the content of communication and away from people and
relationships with people."