Cupboard Notes

... while waiting to get some coffee, I got into conversation with a chap. Somehow we got onto the good and the bad about email. He told me about his son, a senior civil servant who hates email because it keeps him in his office all day. "My son remembers a time", he says, "until even quite recently when he was in much better touch with what was going in in his department because he spent so much more time speaking directly to people, popping in an dout of offices. He says that it's the nuances that matter if you want to know how well your department is working ..."

Moral of this: the over-use of email can become a hindrance, a source of inefficiency. Which of course is ironic because unitil quite recently email was tacitly if not explicitly adopted and accepted as more efficient and a more effectiev way to handle organisational communication.

Now we are less sure. There is more and more data smog. Just like the motor car which at first brought great beneifts but now pollutes the planet, so email brought great benefits - but we are beginning to notice that it brings with it its own kind of  pollution.

It's the nuances that make for effective communication - but ICT filters them or blanks them out. And where do nuances come from? From the context. And context of course is what gets lost in email.