I once held with conviction, the belief that e-mail as a medium promised to radically change human communication for the better. Standing in the Departures Hall of Montreal’s Dorval International Airport, as I said a teary eyed goodbye to a person I deeply cared for, I felt a wave of doubt crash over me. Was e-mail really going to be enough?

Before he left, I was blinded by the simplicity of the send button. It seemed that in order to communicate my most deeply held feeling all I had to do was approach the blank screen waiting open before me, type words onto the screen, and the simple motions would reveal my soul, my thoughts, and my feelings. By submitting to the pressure of the keyboard, by typing words of expression onto the screen, typing the address into the ‘to’ box, typing a witty ‘subject’, I coul breach oceans, continents, countries, and technology with my desire to communicate with him. Yet the context in which I wrote the words, the expressions on my face, the French Canadian gestures that guided them, these things, these non-verbal forms of communication he could not see, were just as important as the digital words on the screen. And utterly without purpose.

In realizing this my confidence was shattered. I began to question myself--the intent of my words. Perhaps my messages had been misread, misinterpreted or misunderstood. What if by the mere process of communication, that journey through the intangible world beyond the drywall, through ground and satellite, through gateways and Internet routes and microwave links the passion which was the impetus for the creation of the message, was misconstrued?

An e-mail is just words on a screen. Words on a screen have no inherent feeling and no emotion in and of themselves. They are not reality, but merely the symbols we choose to represent our emotions, our feelings, and our thoughts. The voice of the person writing them does not speak them; there is no emphasis, no intonation, no subtext, and no humanity,to accompany the script. These words are completely vulnerable to the reader. They are naked until they are dressed with a personality by the person who reads them.

That personality, like the way we take our coffee, will be different for every person. People bring something unique and personal to each e-mail that arrives in their inbox. They impose their moods, their bad day, their sadness, their happiness, their frustration, and their own methods of interpretation onto those words appearing on the screen before them. It is during the excitement of receiving an email and the confirmation: “someone was thinking about me,” that we move from the idea of communication, to an all-consuming selfishness concerned only with how we’ll react and respond to the words before us, and with trying to come up with intelligent feedback, opinions, and thoughts in response. But these thoughts are viewed through our lenses and the way we look at the world. In this manner the words take on new, different, sometimes unintended meanings, and therein lies the problem of e-mail.

Reading one of his many e-mails in a state of sadness and exhaustion lead me to interpret his words in a way he would never intend them to be read. I was looking through the prism of my history of misguided relationships with men who could so easily charm and so quickly bite, through a jaded perspective of what a person could truly feel towards me and through the fear of betrayal. Seeing his words through all these lenses destroyed the truth between us. The lengthy time periods between each response magnified the issues of misunderstanding and made our communication efforts seem ineffective.

E-mail, which once provided us with a way, a means, a door, and a bridge to communicate our thoughts to each other, stood to divide us.

Words can be cognitively different in speech and in writing. In 1967 Marshall McLuhan wrote, “the medium is the message” and never more than today with the technological advances in our global village, is this more relevant. I need only look to the confusion in my personal communication on-line to understand the truth of McLuhan’s school of thought. The messages in our in boxes are simply words and that is the indifference, and the arbitrary nature of the medium of e-mail. Even hand written letters with our own simple yet significant idiosyncrasies can unveil more of our ourselves than Times New Roman script across a computer screen.

Where did communicating via e-mail lead my friend and I? The same vast geographical distance exists between us but the issues have changed. Reluctantly we accepted a vow of silence as the alternative for us until we could talk to each other face to face. Silence, as I have learned, can communicate as much or more than words can. Avoiding the instantaneous thoroughfare of e-mail was the safest route for us to take.

Copyright © 1999 by Juli Strader

Juli Strader received her BA in History and Communications in 1997.Work on her MA begins in January at Carleton University until then she continues to commute between Ottawa and Toronto for work..