The Other Side of E-mail

Robert Kuttner

Email rose along with the rise of technology and the internet. According to Carter Moore,
a former Congressional aide, and Federal employee, webmail services were popular in the mid-
1990s. An email is a communicating tool that serves a lot of time and desk work and has
encouraged new, unheard of types of uses. I have used it mostly for school and business matters.
Email is useful for a student like me. It helps me access accounts on different educational
websites that are helpful for school projects and homework. It gives way for people to make social
media accounts to connect with people around the world. But indeed, like every other good thing,
there are always other bad sides.
Sending email was too easy that sometimes we send emails with typos, grammatical errors,
etc. Consider how rapidly you must access words and decipher meaning when composing an email
or having a discussion. Our minds don't simply stuff away every individual word in our
vocabularies in massive storage facilities, ready to be called upon, individually, immediately.
Rather, most linguistic analysts concur that words are stored in groups according to the relationship
between words. They call the procedure "word priming."
In an examination delineated in David A. Sousa's How the Brain Learns to Read, subjects
were given sets of words. The principal word was known as the "prime," and the subsequent word
was known as the "target." The prime was constantly a genuine word, yet subjects were told the
objective could either be a genuine word or a non-word. In the analysis, specialists demonstrated
the subjects the prime and the target. Individuals were a lot quicker and progressively precise in
settling on choices about target words that were connected in importance to the prime than they
were if the prime and target were minor.
But still, with the occurrence of natural grammatical or typographical errors, proofreading
is still crucial. With the right presence of mind and patience, these errors can be avoided. Reread
the written letter repeatedly so that regrets may be lessened.
Also, in the article, Kuttner said that emails are tone-deaf and all too instant. I agree with
the tone-deaf part. Anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell pioneered the first investigation of nonverbal
correspondence what he called "kinesics." Birdwhistell made some comparative evaluations of the
measure of nonverbal correspondence that happens between people. He found that the verbal
component of a face-to-face conversation is less than 35 percent and that over 65 percent of
communication is done non-verbally. In an email, we lose that 65 percent of communication. Sure,
certain phrases can set a certain mood, but the tone is entirely up to the reader’s perception. The
recipient has to imagine the other 65 percent of the conversation which may lead to
misunderstandings just like the example of Kuttner with his quarrel with a close friend.
It is true that we should be cautious when using email. Just like what Kuttner said, “Do not
e-mail anything private unless you are prepared to see it crop up all over the World Wide Web.”
The World Wide Web covers massive servers from all around the world making everything
vulnerable to bad people. Hackers use keyloggers, RATs, and malware Trojan. These tools and
malware were used to get key information and may use it for their own advantages.
 Indeed, technology and email are convenient and it revolutionized the way the society
lived. However, it led to many disturbing and sad sides that are disadvantageous. Since these bad
sides are always there, it is always best to be cautious and aware of these bad sides.

References
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Moore, C. (2014, May 8). Quora. Retrieved from When did email start to become popularly used
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