RESEARCH General Sociology

COMMUNICATIONS
Misdirected e-mail shows people still unclear about medium's norms

Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor
(217) 333-2177; a-lynn@uiuc.edu

8/1/02

Photo by Bill Wiegand Noshir Contractor, professor of speech communication, believes that despite people’s comfort level with e-mail, some people are oblivious to the consequences of bad "netiquette" – manners on the Internet.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — In the past, the misdirected office memo could trigger red faces and pink slips. Now, it's the rogue e-mail message that can get a person in hot water.

A recent incident in Chicago, involving a young woman's e-mail message to friends, cost her plenty.

Unbeknownst to her, her vivid and self-assured recap of a date was forwarded dozens of times, from person to person, e-mail list to e-mail list. With each forwarding, the message picked up judgmental, even callous, comments about the woman, most of them from people who didn't know her but who found her irritating and the activity amusing. Within a short time, the e-chain linking hundreds of corporate GenXrs showed up in her date's e-mail box, ending that relationship – and perhaps others.

The story raises several red flags, according to experts in the field of communications. Chief among them is the high volume of personal messaging being done on corporate accounts, which is often against company policy and could embarrass companies and jeopardize employees. Another flag: Despite people's comfort level with e-mail, some people are oblivious to the consequences of bad "netiquette" – manners on the Internet. Even now, "We as a society are still discovering and negotiating the norms for e-mail usage," said Noshir Contractor, a professor of speech communication and psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who co-wrote (with Peter Monge) "Theories of Communication Networks" (to be published in January by Oxford University Press).

According to Contractor, the follow-up e-mail messages demonstrate how the medium is used to regulate its own "usage norms." For example, the first respondent cautioned the woman to be more careful before "hitting the send button." Subsequent respondents cautioned others about using e-mail to send such messages. "So the moral appears to be that such conversation is not inappropriate, but that using e-mail to engage in it is, which raises the question about why this medium is not appropriate."

The answer to that, Contractor said, lies in the fact that society is slow to realize that e-mail can shrink the "six degrees of separation."

"The young woman found that out when it took only a few forwarded e-mails before her date became aware of her message. With its incredible ease of forwarding verbatim messages to multiple others, e-mail is liberally greasing the tracks that connect us. Hence, it should not come as a surprise – though it often does – that an e-mail can quickly find itself in the mailbox of an unintended recipient."

There's another issue. These e-mails say a lot about "broader cultural forces that shape how we understand our roles in dating and mating," said Maria Mastronardi, a professor at the Institute of Communications Research at Illinois who is finishing a book about gender, adolescence and popular culture.

"The original e-mail appropriates a discourse about dating directly out of 'Sex and the City' and is full of the contradictions that our culture tends to keep beneath the surface," she said. "By exposing these contradictions in such a blatant manner on e-mail, the woman risked being sanctioned by her peers."