I use email a lot. I seem to be sending questions or replies to my co-workers constantly throughout the day, so you’d think I’d be very good at it. Yet even with all my years of experience communicating through this high-tech medium I still find it difficult to get an idea across without inadvertently sending the wrong message. You’ve seen it yourself, of course. Probably more so on online forums or chats where it’s easy to be misunderstood; people flaming each other over imagined slights, reading innuendos and insults into even the most innocuous comments. I used to chalk it up to problems with the medium itself, plain text. After all, it doesn’t convey the subtleties of how we normally express ourselves, it lacks gestures and inflections and so forth. Now I’m starting to see that answer as a bit too simplistic. Because I know it’s not true.
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