wagner@UToday.COM (Mitch Wagner) (07/19/90)
James G. Smith writes: > There is a fundamental difference between email and voicemail. Email is > composed whereas voicemail is spontaneous. Thus, email has the potential > to contain information which is better organized and certainly requires > less disk space to store. Agreed. On e-mail I can easily turn out a well-organized, lucid message like this, whereas on voicemail, it's more like: "Hi, um..... I guess you're not in.... um.... this is ... um .... Mitch... I just called about.... um, the... um... THING, you know, the THING, the project we're doing next week, you know, the thing.... oh, never mind, give me a call, we'll talk." <HANG UP> <REMEMBER> <CALL AGAIN> "Um, yeah, me again, my phone number is 555-1212." Most of us are used to organizing thoughts of any complexity on paper or TTY. Indeed, TV and radio announcers and politicians and lawyers spend years honing the skill of speaking off-the-cuff in an organized manner on highly complex issues. And some of them never get it right. Mitch Wagner
gt2783c@prism.gatech.edu (Douglas J. Katz) (07/24/90)
I don't understand why we are comparing voice mail with e-mail. I recall a similar discussion about 15 years ago. Some pundit in the newspaper was lamenting the demise of the personal letter. He mentioned the romance of a love letter, the value of a pack of correspondence saved over a lifetime to the historian, and the special feeling one got upon receiving a letter in the mail. He mentioned how lazy we were becoming as a society because, instead of putting pen to paper and composing a letter, spending the extra time to compose our thoughts, we would simply pick up a phone and babble. Sounds like something James Kirpatrick would discuss. Now we are deep into the computer age and we are comparing e-mail with phone mail. In light of the above, the comparison seems considerably less meaningful. Each has its own purpose and each allows the personality of the sender to be transmitted. Email doesn't restrict the range of thought or emotion any more than pen and paper restricts the thought and emotion of a love letter. Phone mail permits as much composition and editing of the message as one is capable in a prepared speech. Each medium is as useful as the sender is willing to make it. If you know your purpose in contacting the other person, then you should have no trouble communicating your thoughts. Doug Katz
sthomas@library.adelaide.edu.au (Steve Thomas) (07/28/90)
George Bray comments: > Recent discussions about the effectiveness of communication by email > or real-time telephone conversations have argued that the textual media > is inferior. I missed the earlier discussions, so maybe this has already been thrashed out, but I have to say that I can't agree. For me, text (e-mail or regular mail) is a much better medium for the communication of complex ideas (i.e. more complex than "can we meet at 3.30?"). The reasons are obvious (to me anyway): text demands that you spend time composing the communication, so you have time to think the issue through, change your mind, retract hasty statements, review etc etc BEFORE you send. None of this is possible with real-time telephone conversation, plus with text you can't be interrupted and lose your train of thought. > Today, VoiceMail is like a store-and-forward telephone answering > machine. The benefits of vocal cues and inflection are available > on a read-it-when-you-want basis. VoiceMail sounds like a dud to me - well ok, I'll accept that it has a place, but hopefully not as a replacement for text mail. If I were submitting this article by VoiceMail, it would have taken me, so far, about ten minutes consisting mostly of long silences while I thought about what I was going to say. Of course, I could have prepared it as text, then read it over the phone, but why read something out loud over the phone when you can send the text? Also, in my experience, people often lose those beneficial vocal cues and inflections when reading out loud. Last but not least, how are you going to incorporate my speech into that report you are preparing for the boss? I guess you'll have to transcribe it! Steve Thomas
gjunell@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU ( Gregorio Cortez ) (08/02/90)
Steve Thomas asserts: > Also, in my experience, people often lose those beneficial vocal cues > and inflections when reading out loud. Another important feature of text is that it hides the irrelevant features of the author. None of us are completely immune to the bias of dialects, stuttering or lisps, charismatic voices, etc. One day video mail (egads, there goes the bandwidth) may bring us the biases of race, age, gender (which is minimal now), and clothing choice. People will have their favorite "posting" hawaiian shirt near the workstation. Greg Junell