One thrust of Sproull and Kieslers’ findings revolves around the paucity of information e-mail users receive about one another. Unable to see and hear fellow users’ responses, they know less about their cohorts than they would in a face-to-face setting and are therefore likely to be more uninhibited … E-mail users are more likely to resort to the sort of scurrilous name-calling known as “flaming,” more likely to be candid, and less likely to be dominated by people with high status
Predictor: Sproull, Lee
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article for Wired magazine, Jacques Leslie quotes Walter Ulrich of the Electronic Messaging Association. Leslie writes: ”The only trouble with success stories … is that while they demonstrate the power of e-mail, they do nothing to illuminate its complex impact on corporate climates and therefore they may be slightly misleading. The distinction is what Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler, the most prominent of academic e-mail researchers, call the difference between ‘first-level effects’ of technology – the anticipated changes … – and ‘second-level effects’ – the unintended consequences, good and bad, of use of the technology. The distinction, which Sproull and Kiesler stress in their influential 1991 book ‘Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization,’ is a vital one, for it points to the areas of controversy that currently dominate research work on e-mail. Most researchers seem to agree on e-mail’s first-level effects – indeed, like Sproull and Kiesler they are e-mail enthusiasts who are persuaded of its value to organizations and use the medium in their own professional communications – but they are nowhere close to a consensus about its secondary effects. Of course, it’s the elusive and variegated nature of those effects that gives e-mail research its spice. One thrust of Sproull and Kieslers’ findings revolves around the paucity of information e-mail users receive about one another. Unable to see and hear fellow users’ responses, they know less about their cohorts than they would in a face-to-face setting and are therefore likely to be more uninhibited. Thus, Sproull and Kiesler argue, e-mail users are more likely to resort to the sort of scurrilous name-calling known as ‘flaming,’ more likely to be candid, and less likely to be dominated by people with high status, since such evidence of it as expensive clothes or an authoritative speaking manner are absent. Sproull and Kiesler cite studies buttressing all of these assertions.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1991
Topic of prediction: Communication
Subtopic: E-mail
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Mail Bonding
Quote Type: Paraphrase
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/e-mail_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney