The American Journal of Sociology has published a study by Daniel A. Menchik and Xiaoli Tian on the semiotics of email (h/t contexts). According to the abstract:
E‐mail excludes the multiple nonlinguistic cues and gestures that facilitate face‐to‐face communication. How, then, should interaction in a text‐based context be understood? The authors analyze the problems and solutions experienced by a research panel that communicated over e‐mail and face‐to‐face for 18 months, evaluating both kinds of exchanges alongside survey and interview data. Semiotic and linguistic theory is used to expose essential properties associated with the successful communication of meaning in each context. The authors find that e‐mail requires the cultivation of new techniques for specifically conveying the “pragmatic information” that connects the meaning of words to their users. Such information is assigned in e‐mail through the use of what are termed emphatic, referential, and characterizing semiotic tactics. These tactics are also evident in sustained online interactions studied by other researchers. This theoretical vocabulary represents an alternative to the dominant sociological characterization of e‐mail as an inferior substitute for face‐to‐face interaction.
The full article can be reached here. Thoughts?
Whoa, lots of big words there:)My question is this : is this research arguing that email is as effective as face to face communication if one uses those “new techniques , and emphatic, referential and characterizing semiotic tactics”? (What are those, anyway? Not just smiley faces, right?)I often think that I must be much more careful in email, because it is harder to express the meaning without the visual clues and facial expressions. So how do we substitute for those in emails?
Oh yeah, sociologists love the big words! To answer your question, the authors argue that email interactions present problems such as tone and context that are often more easily mitigated in face-to-face interactions, but that we have developed these “semiotic tactics” for email that can be as effective. They write, “Similarity between the semiotic underpinnings of face‐to‐face and e‐mail interaction makes it unsurprising that people can cultivate ways of communicating in online contexts that are equally as effective as those used offline.” Those tactics include smiley faces, as well as capitalization, quotation marks, qualifications, cutting-and-pasting from prior emails, and signatures that include information about your institutional affiliation–you know, the things we do all the time when we write email, even when we’re not totally cognizant of the fact that we’re employing all those “semiotic tactics”.