Speech or writing?: E-mail as a new medium

Liberal Education, Summer, 2001 by Kathleen C. Boone

Adapted from a paper given at AAC&U's Annual Meeting, January 2001 DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN SPEECH AND WRITING have long been identified in Western linguistics, literary theory, and philosophy. In the twentieth century, from Austin and Searle through Derrida and other poststructuralist theorists, it has been observed that speech is, for example, immediate and evanescent, writing distant and permanent. Writing is a matter of record, its codifying and formalizing character accounting for the familiar insistence that certain messages be "put in writing," that a signature authenticate the message and thereby "make it so." Formal oratory notwithstanding, everyday speech is, on the other hand, largely informal and typically spontaneous. Spoken communication tends to occur synchronously; it "disappears"; it is considerably less subject than writing to post hoc verification; and it partakes, as writing does not, of the "visual grammar" of body language, pause, rate, and tone.

E-communication

Electronic communication, particularly e-mail, hybridizes the characteristics of speech and writing to such an extent that e-communication might legitimately be viewed as a new medium of human communication, unique in its character and thus unique in the problems it poses for communicators. This is obviously a vast topic. I will highlight three particularly suggestive aspects of this problematic: (1) the asynchronicity of e-communication in the guise of immediacy, (2) the nature of the document; and (3) the problem of defining quality.

Asynchronicity

Like speech, e-mail affords the possibility of immediacy, more or less, in communication, assuming of course that one is in a chat-room or the sort of person who stays constantly logged on and responds instantly and slavishly to signals of new mail. The reality, for most of us, sender and recipient alike, is that we have very few reliable predictors of when our messages will be read or when they will be answered.

Like speech, e-communication may be essentially immediate; unlike speech, it may be deeply asynchronous, and always unpredictably so. Expectations of sender and recipient may, therefore, be deeply disjointed in this regard. Snail-mail users can know with reasonable certainty when to expect that check "in the mail" or when one's letter of complaint will be received. With e-mail, we typically deal not in days and weeks, but hours and minutes, but we also have very little idea whether our heated rejoinder to a provocative e-message will be read two minutes or two hours or two weeks from now, leading to all sorts of ugly consequences as most of us have painfully learned by now.

If, as in a course-based or other affinity discussion list, multiple participants converse, permutations grow exponentially the more discussants involved. The overlay and intersection of messages (both declarative and interrogatory) occur notably outside a "normal" chronological framework, i.e., I said, then she said, then he said. What happens, in short, when the accustomed linearity of communication is shattered, when the notion of "interruption" (as in spoken communication) no longer pertains, when one can't necessarily know whether a given message is a "response" and to what or to whom? What are the costs--confusion, to name one--and the benefits--a wonderfully rich stew of voices blending and bubbling forth, unbound by parameters of space and time?

Long before electronic communication, Michel Foucault used the imagery of a web of discourse, a place where "so many authors who know or do not know one another, criticize one another, invalidate one another, pillage one another, meet without knowing it, and obstinately intersect their unique discourses in a web of which they are not the masters, of which they cannot see the whole, and of whose breadth they have a very inadequate idea" (Archaeology of Knowledge, 1969). One can only imagine, with regret, Foucault's contribution to our understanding of electronic communication had he lived to encounter it.

The document

Second, the nature of the document. In the academy, in business, and the other professional worlds for which we prepare our students, we place great store in documents. The text, the paper, the memorandum, the brief. Putting it in writing makes it permanent and "real" in ways that speech typically does not. Documents are "kept": filed in cabinets, shelved in libraries, archived in musty back rooms where, though never read or seen again, they ensure against the horror that a "record" might be "lost."

Is an e-message a document? Sort of, it depends--seems the working answer for most of us. Witness the speech-like informality of many e-mail messages--the carelessness with grammar, punctuation, spelling--the apparent attitude of many of us that e-mail resembles speech more than writing. Witness on the other hand the felt sense of both speech-like spontaneity and writing-like distance that accounts for the remarkable phenomenon of people sending save-able, printable acrimonious diatribes they would never dream of either speaking to one's face or "putting in writing," i.e., in a "hard copy" memo or letter.