Recently, I got an email complaining about an article I’d written. It happens. The angry tone was nothing if not consistent until very near the end. One question. After all that rage, why did she sign off with her first name and two kisses?
This week I received an email from a PR woman with whom I had not previously corresponded, let alone met. It started with “Hi Stu” and ended with “warm regards”. The “warm” part especially threw me.
What is going on in my inbox? Isn’t it obvious? Even in cyberspace, women just can’t help throwing themselves at me. Even when they want to tell me off, they can’t help disclosing they fancy me. Even when they’re trying to get me to puff their products, they can’t stop themselves disclosing the warmth of their feelings for me. Such are the perils of being an amazingly attractive and successful journalist-cum-babe-magnet.
Or maybe not. Perhaps, rather, the bizarre intimacy of strangers and colleagues in emails to me is symptomatic of a broader social malaise — namely we don’t know how to begin, and, worse yet, we don’t know how to end our emails. What’s more, because email is such a casual means of communication, it privileges those who prize informality. What happened to “Dear Sir”, “Yours faithfully” and the bracing pleasures of a firm handshake? I ask. They died, you reply, but nobody bothered to tell you, granddad.
But isn’t this a terrible change? Why, without wishing to be too fogeyish about the issue, can’t we seek to emulate the farewells of French correspondents in the 18th century? Why do we end with “Laters, yeah?”, “Sweet as” or “Big hugs”, rather than “Je vous prie d’agréer, monsieur, les assurances de mon profond respect”, or the equivalent in English?
What seems clear is that we still haven’t developed a workable etiquette for emails. “Most onliners are not clear communicators,” says Judith Kallos, of www.netmanners.com and author of an ebook on email etiquette. “If you think about it, we haven’t had to rely on communicating with the written word in decades. Just a mere century ago people wrote letters daily. This meant choosing their words carefully and thoughtfully to communicate the emotion and intent of their writings. Now, fast forward this century and many emails appear to be written by someone who didn’t make it out of primary school.”
Good point. A colleague got an email recently, again from a PR person, which began: “Dear Clint [not his real name], How are you? I’m good — loving the weather! …” The rest of the email was a pitch to interview somebody about their dull-sounding cultural artefact. It concluded: “Cheers!”
Three questions: Had Clint and his emailer been introduced? Is it reasonable to dive into one’s appreciation of prevailing climactic conditions in one’s first email? Wasn’t Clint’s correspondent — like someone who expects sex on a first date when the other person isn’t sure even if there’s going to be a second rendezvous — rushing things? And yet that rush to an ersatz intimacy is precisely what characterises many emails, particularly business ones. One often has the feeling that over-intimate sign-offs are used to establish relationships where none existed, only because to do so is presumed to help sell a product.
A more innocent explanation is that typewritten virtual correspondence is such a chilly medium that we seek to rebel by infusing it with warmth. According to Alex Reid, director of the Oxford Computer Centre, who prepared an email etiquette guide that can be consulted at www.lse.ac.uk/itservices/rules/email.htm: “Email lacks the other cues and clues that convey the sense in which what you say is to be taken, and you can easily convey the wrong impression. If you meant something in jest, use a “smiley” [ 🙂 ] to convey that.”
It’s this supposed hopelessness of emails at handling emotional nuances that makes such “emoticons” so popular. But I don’t hold with emoticons (shorthand for emotion icons): if you can’t express yourself and your emotions in words, maybe you should stop emailing/writing/verbally communicating altogether and convey your feelings in a series of grunts or by holding up signs others have drawn for you, you sub-articulate chimp.
Aren’t I, you may well be thinking, making a big fuss over nothing? Shouldn’t I just enjoy getting a couple of kisses from a strange, angry woman? Maybe. After all, as Michael Ignatieff writes in his book The Needs of Strangers: “Our task is to find a language for our need for belonging which is not just a way of expressing nostalgia, fear, estrangement from modernity.” A new language is being born in cyberspace, and, if it is more intimate than I am used to, so be it. Perhaps I should just get over myself.
Laters, yeah? Mad love!
Stuie xx. — Â