Jason at 37signals.com asks "Why do we treat email differently than a phone call?"
I think the answer is a lot simpler than the dozens of commenters imply: we treat email differently because text can be manipulated in ways that audio content cannot.
I could record all the phone calls I take or make but what would be the point? I couldn't go back and search through them, it's impossible to "scan through" a conversation to see the interesting/important bits, etc.
Although it's true that you could do all of this with transcripts of phone calls the fact remains that transcribing those calls is a Herculean task; either you need a dedicated secretary or you need to be very understanding of the mistakes made by your voice recognition software. All of this doesn't even get into the difficulty of either the secretary or the software dealing with accents, voice modulation and so on.
A lot of the meaning in a conversation (even on the phone) comes from things other than the actual words used. With email, the entirety of the conversation is captured. You see what you saw when the email first arrived.
Bottom line, we treat phone calls and email differently because the two media (voice and text) are divergent in so many aspects.
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1 comment:
ugh thats some spammogram...
another way phone calls and email differ thats intersting is calls have immediate feedback, an email is essentially fire and forget... which means you have to word an email far more carefully than a phone conversation... if you are misunderstood you can rectify the situation easily, whereas if an email is misunderstood it can be somewhat more serious.
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