COLUMN ONE : On-Line, and Maybe Out of Line : Talking by computer has changed the way workers behave (and misbehave). E-mail lets people be creative, free--and blunt. Firms try to short-circuit problems by getting users to think before they send.
John Jessen gets paid to snoop through other people’s electronic mail--those impulsive scribblings that people like to think of as private. According to Jessen, he rarely blushes anymore. He’s seen it all.
Take love letters. He only notices if they’re missing: It’s a tip-off that someone has been cleaning house, says Jessen, whose business is sniffing out incriminating electronic evidence in legal cases.
There was a boss’s sniping that helped nail a case of sex discrimination. There are idle blabbings that reveal patent infringement. There are people conspiring to defraud an employer--leaving tracks in the company computer.
“There’s no question whatsoever that people write and put things in the computer that they would not put anywhere else,” said Jessen, a Seattle-based software sleuth, who has stumbled upon what is proving to be a great lesson of the electronic age.
Recent research into how people behave (and misbehave) on computer--how they chat, scheme, gossip, confer--suggests that many feel freer when talking electronically than they do talking face to face.
That lack of inhibition can be useful and creative in offices and classrooms. But it can also be destructive--a fact that is prompting some workplaces to train users to think before they send.
Studies have found that the language people use on a computer is spontaneous and uninhibited, with moments of surprising self-revelation. Words turn up in unusual contexts. Visual--or graphic--jokes are common.
Similar patterns surface in studies of the social dynamics of computerized workplaces: Milquetoasts assert themselves in on-line meetings, underlings short-circuit the hierarchy, decision makers embrace risk.
Even one on one, researchers say, there is an untrammeled quality to on-line behavior. Users have a tendency to fly off the electronic handle. They are more likely to be excessively blunt, even to act irresponsibly.
“People have conversations that they probably wouldn’t have had if they had been together in a room,” Jessen said. Normally, for such frankness to occur, “it would have been the old ‘Get Smart’ thing: They would have to have the ‘Cone of Silence.’ ”
Now, companies are developing tricks aimed at staving off messy faux pas .
At IBM, an iron-clad imperative of the in-house computer conference is straight out of Debrett’s Etiquette: No talk of religion or politics. Irony and sarcasm are discouraged too, in deference to foreign speakers.
When it became apparent two years ago that Los Angeles police officers had used patrol car computers for racially and sexually offensive jokes, the department assigned a team of censors to spot-check message traffic (a practice that in most cases appears to be legal).
At Southern California Edison, injudicious messaging became such a problem that a new command allows senders to yank back messages before they are read. It is one of the most popular functions on the computer system.
(It was of no use, however, to the Edison employee who composed a parody of the Book of Genesis--in which God was required to get an environmental impact report done before proceeding with the Creation. The author sent the parody to a co-worker, innocently enough. But the co-worker forwarded it to an automatic distribution list. Soon, it was in the files of hundreds of employees--and the author was facing a reprimand.)
No one knows how many Americans communicate by computer--by electronic mail or in computer conferences or bulletin boards. The Electronic Mail Assn., a trade group based in Arlington, Va., says one estimate puts the figure at 30 million to 50 million.
They range from members of President Clinton’s communications staff to Cornell University students baring their souls to a computerized counseling service. There are lawyers, utility line workers, Hollywood executives, scientists and high school sophomores.
To the uninitiated, the shift to computers can be jarring.
“It’s the insecurity of a new medium,” said Einar Stefferud, president of Network Management Associates, a consulting firm in Huntington Beach. “Every time we invent a new medium--for communication or transport or whatever--we have to develop a new etiquette to live with it.”
Ever since electronic mail became available in the 1960s, computerized communication has been seen as a medium as revolutionary as the telephone. Norms of behavior appropriate to phone or face-to-face encounters, or even letters, would not necessarily apply; old rules would have to be revised.
As many see it, the peculiar quality of electronic mail stems from two traits: It is text-based and it is evanescent. Missing from any computer encounter are the revealing grin or scowl or apologetic tone, or such social cues as the correspondent’s corner office, fancy letterhead or nervous tic.
And when the text appears to be ephemeral, the stakes seem smaller.
“These two features make it easy for a sender to forget or ignore his or her audience,” according to researchers Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler, of Boston University and Carnegie Mellon University respectively. “Without reminders of an audience, people become less constrained by conventional norms and rules for behavior.”
As a result, electronic messages can seem startlingly blunt, Sproull and Kiesler found. Discussions can escalate into name-calling. Unbound by social pressures, people feel more free. Their behavior, Kiesler has written, “becomes more extreme, impulsive and self-centered.”
Now, as more researchers are exploring social effects of computerized communication, they have documented similar tendencies in such areas as language, teamwork and interoffice dynamics.
In one study of the language used by novice users in a months-long conference conducted entirely by computer, Harriet Wilkins of Indiana University-Purdue University found a striking sense of intimacy among participants--even though they were spread across the country and knew little about each other’s lives.
Wilkins found that the language--informal, vivid, innovative, with frequent use of personal names--contributed to the bonding. The messages’ spontaneity, she theorized, made users feel they were getting to know each other in a particularly intimate way.
If the stops, starts and repetitions of spoken language offer a glimpse of the creative process, then seeing these patterns on screen “may carry a particularly powerful quality of self-disclosure and, with it, the basis for a sense of intimacy,” Wilkins concluded.
“What I saw was a kind of community-creation with the language,” Wilkins said in an interview. “Those people didn’t know each other, by and large, before they got started. They came to feel that they knew each other quite well in those first few months of the conversation.”
In studies of group dynamics, researchers have found that “electronic groups” are more democratic than those that meet in person: Members participate more equally and even the lowly and tongue-tied can shine. Idiosyncrasy flourishes.
There is also a playful quality to electronic-group communication that some researchers suspect the medium encourages. In a study of a large office-products firm, researchers at Carnegie Mellon found that more than 40% of e-mail came from extracurricular groups formed to trade information about movies, gossip and other special interests.
In other research, Kiesler asked corporate managers to make decisions about investments--some meeting face to face, others via computer. She found that in computer meetings, they were more willing to take risks and join in, less cowed by the presence of others of higher status. But while they spoke more openly, Kiesler found, there was also a downside; people occasionally resorted to the kind of name-calling and personal remarks known in computer-buff lingo as “flaming.”
“Flame wars” are not uncommon in class discussions in an on-line university, said Paul Levinson, president of Connected Education Inc., through which students worldwide take courses toward a master’s degree via computer. Levinson blames a principle of computerized communication he calls “Levinson’s addendum to Murphy’s Law: An ambiguous comment will always be interpreted in the worst possible way.”
He recalled one student who became abusive when his ideas were attacked--something Levinson believes the student would not have done in a regular classroom. But signing on to his computer at home, perhaps late at night, and finding his ideas under fire, the student erupted.
“The synapse between the brain and the fingertip seems to be shorter than the synapse between the brain and the tongue,” Levinson said. “If a person gets angry or furious, there’s no internal censor or no social censor.”
“Before (computers), if I was really angry, it took time to find the person and vent my anger. A lot of times, I cooled down,” said Michael Gutting, a unit manager for Southern California Edison. “Now, I can just hit a button and, in a matter of 30 seconds, send off hate mail to dozens of people.”
So the “disinhibition” seen with computers can have disadvantages as well as advantages for teamwork, suggests Robert E. Kraut, director of interpersonal communication research at Bellcore, the organization that does research for the seven regional telephone companies. Familiar and intimate in some contexts, computer talk can, at other times, come off as painfully blunt.
In one study, Kraut asked students to critique a fictitious co-author’s manuscript in writing and into a microphone. In writing, the students were brusque, impersonal, even nasty. But orally, they elaborated, used more personal pronouns and tempered their criticisms with tentative phrasing.
“Some of the research we’ve done says that communicating electronically, and writing in general, tends to be less emotional, subtle and less social--in the sense that you often lose the notion that the person you’re talking to is another human being,” Kraut said in an interview.
Although Kraut believes electronic mail and fax can be useful in bridging gaps in time and distance and for sending factual information, he has argued they will be insufficient “to support the planning and social relationships characteristic of intellectual teamwork.”
Over time, however, users of electronic mail learn to improvise.
There are already dozens of symbols--the best known is the smiling face--that people use to re-inject tone of voice and mood in electronic messages. Combining fragments of punctuation, they have come up with faces that grin, frown, scream, wink.
“If someone sends a note to you in upper case, that’s the equivalent of shouting,” Gutting said. “If it’s all in lower case without much punctuation, it’s like a chat in the hallway. We’ve created a little banner that people can include that says ‘Do not file, print or forward this note.’ ”
IBM, of course, represents the most sophisticated computer culture. Its employees have moved far beyond the shock that seizes newly computerized workplaces. Electronic mail and computer conferencing have surpassed the telephone. Employees send 2,500 to 3,000 contributions every day to the company’s computer conferencing system, IBMPC, alone--more words each day than are in Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.”
On a recent afternoon at the sprawling campus of IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., a jovial, silver-haired man sat in the glow of a multicolored screen and ventured into the company’s 12-year-old computer conferencing facility. The rules of the system are, by now, well-known, Davis A. Foulger, the IBMPC administrator, explained. So the penalties for breaking them are rarely used.
Perhaps 10 times, according to Foulger, people have been expelled from the conference. Submissions are scanned regularly for violations. A program called VOODOO (Virtual Organizer Optimizer Disk Organizer Optimizer) was removed after someone complained that it violated the religion rule.
There is even a special forum within IBMPC, called SENSITIV, for discussion of volatile issues. There, people can be found wrestling with such matters as the offensiveness of the term “Chinese fire drill” and whether it is appropriate to correct someone’s malapropisms on-line.
Over time, users have regained some of their inhibitions. They know now their words can slip beyond their grasp--permanently recorded somewhere in the system, or copied and forwarded without their knowledge to hundreds, or thousands, of people around the world.
These days, Peter J. Andrews, a program administrator at IBM, occasionally abandons the computer in mid-conversation and picks up the phone. “Call me about this,” he recalled typing to a correspondent in one case, when the feeling crept over him “that the person was going to get insulting.”
“As people get more and more experienced, and perhaps get burned once or twice, I think it will cause them to get a little more careful or a little more thoughtful,” said Peter G. Capek, a research staff member.
After all, Capek added: “There’s still no substitute for seeing the whites of their eyes.”
Saying It With a Smile
To counteract the impersonality of computer messages, computer users have improvised a repertoire of faces to signify the writer’s mood, using punctuation marks and other symbols available on the average keyboard. Here is a collection of some common and not-so-common icons, or “emoticons.” They appear sideways here, as they would on the computer screen.
:-) BASIC SMILEY FACE: This smiley face is used to inflect a sarcastic or joking statement because voice inflection can’t be heard in computer mail.
;-) WINKY SMILEY FACE: User intends to make a flirtatious and/or sarcastic remark.
:-( FROWNING FACE: User did not like the last statement or is upset or depressed about something.
SOURCE: John Jessen, Electronic Evidence Discovery, Seattle
