The Problems with Email Conversations

I have been addicted to email for some time. I check email just about every day, from the time I get up until I go to bed, sometimes even late at night. I don’t always respond the moment I see something, but I know it is there. I send and receive countless emails every day. Some are from friends, some from family, some are silly, some are serious, some are related to my music, some are related to my ongoing education, or something I have written online, but most are related to my church. Between all the different spheres, there are emails coming in 24/7, and I send out almost as many as I receive.

Anyone who does email a lot will tell you that inevitably, some of those emails will either have a hint of conflict or, at least, the potential for conflict. A certain percentage of emails cause misunderstanding, and that percentage is considerably higher than the misunderstandings occurring within verbal conversation. Those who know this by experience find themselves tiptoeing through the keypad, often gingerly hitting the send button, never knowing for sure if we have misspoken until we receive the response. And with email, there is always a period of waiting for the response, and that waiting also adds just a little bit more stress to life.

Many times I find myself waiting to hear back from multiple sources, wondering if I have been misunderstood, if I have upset someone, or maybe I’ve very stupidly used email to let someone else know that they’ve upset me. And now I’m waiting to see if they understand, or if things have gotten even worse. And I wait... And I wonder what they’re thinking... And I worry... STUPID!

Now, if the percentage of possibly difficult emails is just five percent, then for me that’s about three or four emails per day that potentially have some kind of conflict attached. And so I’m checking email constantly, wondering what so and so will say about so and so... or will they even respond? Why aren’t they responding? Did I say something offensive without meaning to? What if I forget about the whole situation, because in sending the email I checked it off my list... but what if they never respond? What if they ignored it or never read it. What if it went into their spam folder? Or worse, what if they took something the “wrong” way? Was I out of line? It’s been a day and a half, and no response. What is going on? When will they respond? What have I done!

“Dear Charlie, I hope you didn’t take me wrong in my last email. I didn’t mean to come across too strong. I just meant to say.... blah, blah, blah, blah....”

Three more days of scanning my emails for one from Charlie, and finally Charlie writes back....

“Dear Mark, No, no everything’s fine... good point. By the way, your sermon last Sunday reminded me of the old days... Bye, Charlie”

The old days? Is he saying my sermon was old fashioned? Was it too traditional? Did I hammer people like the preachers of old? Or is he saying that I used to preach great when he first came to church, but then it started to stink, until last Sunday it was good again? Or maybe he was only saying he has fond memories of sermons in his childhood and this reminded him of that for some positive reason? So, not knowing whether to be offended or not, of course, I write back:

"Hey Charlie, not meaning to be a pain, but I just wanted to try to understand what you were saying about “the old days.”

And I wait for his response... and I check back to see if it is there like every five minutes for the next 2 days. (I know I need email intervention.) Email can drive a person insane!

I haven’t even talked about the intentionally hurtful emails, which are rare but unforgettable. Then there are the three page email writers who expect you to respond to every point, point by point, when the whole issue could have been covered in a five minute verbal conversation. Then there are the forwards, most of which are stupid and have been going around for a decade, and there are the scams and the misinformation. I have a love-hate relationship with email. It’s kind of a co-dependency thing... can’t live with it, can’t live without it.

Now, what really are the problems with email as a format for conversation? Well, I’ll tell you. The first problem is obvious... emotion. It is extremely easy to read the wrong emotion into an email. It happens constantly, and many times we never even find out that we were wrong in our interpretation. We just let it hurt our relationship with that other person and never say anything about it, which is also sad. Even from one sentence to the next, we can get the wrong emotional idea from emails. Is it sarcastic? Are they angry? Are they snide? Are they laughing? Is there an underlying point the writer is trying to make? Is there an insinuation? Are they sad? Are they speaking softly or are they yelling? Who knows? And emoticons might help a tiny bit, but those are for girls... so they’re no help to me anyway.

The second problem with email as a method for conversation is that a huge percentage of verbal communication is supported by body language... facial expressions, hand movements, posture, etc. You can’t look into someone’s eyes when you’re reading an email. Are they laid back or are they intense? Are they animated or are they passive about it? How big of a deal is it to them? Who knows?

The third problem is that people are almost always more harsh in writing than in person. We don’t see how our words are affecting the listener. We don’t feel it as much. We don’t have that moment of recognizing that we’re hurting the other person more than we intended to, or that we’re angering the other person, which might motivate us to back down, or even backtrack and reword things. Instead, we just plow on through, only to find out in the response just how horribly the other person interpreted our words. And now it’s too late, because those words are right there in black and white, and I’ve found that people have a very hard time letting go of their initial interpretation, even if you try hard to explain it.

A fourth problem is the stark, pick-it-apart nature of written communication. You could write 5 paragraphs of positive, and two sentences of negative, but when you get the response back it will be like the only thing you wrote were the two sentences of negative. This doesn’t happen as much with verbal communication, because we can’t go back and read the things we hear over and over. We hear audible communication more holistically, but read written conversations in separate pieces. When we read, we tend to divide things out into sentences and paragraphs, and we can take more time to analyze what we like and what we don’t like about what is being said. Conversely, when we listen to someone talk, it all kind of averages together, so anything potentially negative doesn’t stick out like it does in an email.

The fifth problem is less often addressed. It is an inherent problem with one-sided communication. There is simply no ability for the listener to interject. This allows the author to rant and rave and say a whole bunch of stuff that he or she may never have said, if the listener had a chance to get a word in edgewise. This is incredibly frustrating and upsetting for the listener. We so need to recognize this. There is nothing more frustrating than to have someone make incorrect assumptions about you, and then to place you in a position of defending those wrong assumptions. This is painful enough in verbal communication, where you can interject. Add to this the one-sided nature of an email and incorrect assumptions can send someone through the roof.

How many assumptions are made in emails? We even say things like, “Now I know you may be thinking...” or “You probably don’t agree, but...” and then the other person can’t even say, “uh, no... I don’t think that,” so we go on for a page with potentially loaded words that we never would have said had the other person had an opportunity to interject, or even shake their head.

What if our initial assumption is wrong? What if the person wanted to say, “No wait, that’s not what I meant at all?” Six paragraphs later, you’ve made enough hurtful assumptions that it doesn’t even matter whether the other person meant what you thought or not, because now you’re going to be dealing with what you said, which would have never been said, if the other person had been there to correct your misunderstandings.

Ok, now listen. I know all of this stuff is true. I haven’t read any of this anywhere. This comes from personal experience. I have experienced the problems of email communication almost daily for probably 15 years. And boy have I had some tough emails to read. But sometimes I still do the very thing I hate! I always think I can manage it somehow this time, with enough qualifications... enough diplomacy... And I don’t know about you, but I’ll even pat myself on the back for how much more I was going to say, that I edited out... Didn’t I try to be as nice and diplomatic as possible? And so, because I made an extra effort, I feel exonerated for trying to converse through email once again. What a dummy.

I don’t know how many times I’ve almost not sent an email response, only to go ahead and send it. Why? Because it was so eloquently written! I know I’ll never be able to make my points so well in person, plus if I delete it, I will have wasted all the time I spent writing it! And I know other people think the same way, because I receive their emails.

Sometimes, it gets so bad, that I literally expect to have a stressful or painful email every time I look at the computer. I can see that I have emails from people, and I click on them with fear and trepidation, hurrying to see what it says, and when it doesn’t say something that is potentially charged with emotion or is confusingly sarcastic or critical, I actually let out a sigh of relief. Whew... one more benign email in the books.

I’m sure ninety five percent of the emails I receive are harmless. But in Russian roulette, there’s only one out of 6 chances that you’re going to blow you’re head off. I feel like I’m rolling the dice every time I check email. It’s insane. It’s stupid! I have developed a phobia of emails... and not just of the ones I receive, but of those I send. The only way I can make sure there is nothing to fear is to check email and make sure I don’t have a difficult one. And then for like the next five minutes, I’m okay. I’m exaggerating in all of this, of course.

But don’t you just wonder what it would be like if we didn’t have all these quick forms of written communication? Texting, chat and Facebook obviously have similar issues. What if we just had to call and actually talk to the person? Even voice messages don’t have the same problems. Or better yet, what if we had to make the effort to go and talk face to face on any matter of personal importance? Certainly, much would be left unsaid. The Bible indicates that there is wisdom in speaking less. I wonder how much wiser I would be and appear if I never tried to have another conversation through email or similar means.

Knowing all of this, I honestly wonder what we should do. Leave a comment if you have an idea. I think I need to make myself some new guidelines. And it would be really cool if everyone I know would think about this too. :-)