You’ve Got Email Voice

A variety of things lately have led me to begin using the term Email Voice in reference to the way that we are often “heard” by those on the receiving end of our verbiage. If Email Voice was enjoying a killer senior year, it would be voted Most Likely To Make Your Co-workers Think “What Did You MEAN By That?” Email Voice is what comes out, despite our best attempts to “say” what we actually mean (or think we mean) via email, or IM, or blogging, or [insert alternate web-based variety of communique here]. 

It makes me think of all those statistics you hear about how important body language is to communication… or how many context clues we get from what we can see and hear versus what we glean from sitting under fluorescent lights in cubicles looking at groups of pixels on dusty screens, which form words, which form sentences, and so forth and so on. I can’t remember any of the percentages off-hand, but i’m sure they are impressive, as are most widely-quoted (though most likely slightly misleading) statistics. 

I want less Email Voice and more face time. I don’t want to “talk to” people on a daily basis… I want to TALK to them and be able to look at their eyes and actually share some space. So that’s why I blog. 

Because my capacity for hypocrisy is amazing.