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E-Mail. Use
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In society
Flaming
Many observers bemoan the rise of flaming in written communications. Flaming occurs when one person sends an angry and/or antagonistic message. Flaming is assumed to be more common today because of the ease and impersonality of e-mail communications: confrontations in person or via telephone require direct interaction, where social norms encourage civility, whereas typing a message to another person is an indirect interaction, so civility may be forgotten.
In business
E-mail was widely accepted by the business community as the first broad electronic communication medium and was the first ‘e-revolution’ in Business communication. E-mail is very simple to understand and like postal mail, e-mail solves two basic problems of communication. LAN based email is also an emerging form of usage for business. It not only allows the business user to download mail when offline, it also provides the small business user to have multiple users email ID's with just one email connection.
Pros
Much of the business world relies on communication between individuals who are physically distant from one another; organizing and participating in an in-person meeting can be time-consuming and expensive. Email provides a near-instantaneous exchange of information at little cost. Teleconferencing bridges physical distance, but the logistics of gathering people together at the same time remains.
- The problem of synchronization
For real time communication, participants generally have to be working on the same schedule. They need to be at the same place at the same time and spend the same amount of time on the same information.
E-mail allows each participant to decide when and how they will process the information.
Cons
Most business professionals today spend between 20% and 50% of their working time using e-mail: reading, ordering, sorting, ‘re-contextualizing’ fragmented information and of course writing emails. Use of e-mail is increasing, due to trends of globalization—distribution of organizational divisions, outsourcing, among others. E-mail can lead to some well-known problems:
- Loss of Context: Information in context (as in a newspaper) is much easier and faster to understand than unsorted fragments. Communicating in context is faster and more efficient.
- Spam: E-mail is a push-only medium: control of who receives information lies primarily with the sender. This can lead to an overflow of unwanted or irrelevant information.
- Inconsistency: E-mail can duplicate information. This may be a problem when a team is collaboratively working on documents.
Despite these disadvantages, and despite the availability of other tools, e-mail-based communication is still the most widely used written medium in businesses.
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