mediajunk

The effects of email on culture -- particularly office culture -- is one of the quiter, yet most transformative aspects of the internet revolution. I once worked on a huge web project (an internet bank), where 400 of us worked (to a tight deadline!) in three giant rooms. Most of the day, we sat looking at screens, pointing, clicking and typing: most of that time, we were turning our email around.

Who were we mailing? Each other, of course. Most of the emails I sent/received were to/from the colleague who sat nearest me!

Messages between us were often trivial, like leaving post-it notes. Among the wider community that evolved and disappeared in those months when the project went from scratch to launch, the most frequently sent message was the "blame mail": an ongoing record of "requests" -- i.e. who asked whom to do what. These requests would often generate unweildy list-mails, with the history of the request -- a long chain of messages -- attached to the bottom of the current message. Not all of these were to do with our IT project; the most trivial social matters ate up much of the system.

The subject of a "blame mail" might read: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Parking Spaces, followed by a message thread that would begin (at the bottom) with a complaint about someone parking in someone else's space and a request to provide a new space, followed by a list of arguments about whose responsibility it was, rebuttals, refusals, buck-passing, all of which was sneakly CC'd (or, even slyer, BCC'd) to "senior management".

There's probably a book or two to be written on how email has changed office culture. Hey, if you're thinking of writing one, an essay currently ranked high in Popdex, entitled The Tyranny of Email, is a good place to start. Just rememeber to credit me on the inside cover ;)