One of the emerging differences between use of the Internet among blind
persons and t hat of the mainstream is how e-mail is being used. The
article below explains why some will not use it for certain kinds of
communication or are nervous about using it.
kelly
from the New York times
November 11, 1998
E-Mail Takes the Stand and Companies Take a Stand on E-Mail
By AMY HARMON
Employees at Amazon.com, the popular Internet bookseller, recently received in their e-mail a directive from senior management that struck some as Orwellian.
As part of an event that the Seattle-based company designated "Sweep and Keep," employees were instructed to purge, among other things, e-mail messages that were no longer required for business or not subject to legal records requirements. Free lattes would be dispensed in the cafeteria to those who complied immediately, the directive said.
This Amazon "document retention" policy, which requires employees to expunge electronic files regularly, was followed a few weeks later with guidelines for "document creation."
"Quite simply put, there are some communications that should not be expressed in written form," the Oct. 20 memo stated. "Sorry, no lattes this time!"
Never mind monopoly power in the marketplace; the real lesson corporate America is taking away from the Microsoft antitrust trial is that old e-mail can be a mine field of legal liability, not to mention a source of public embarrassment.
In the high-profile court battle between the Justice Department and the Microsoft Corp., e-mail has emerged as the star witness -- a fact that appears to be giving pause to corporate executives accustomed to clicking "send" without a second thought.
"I love e-mail," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder and chief executive. "I think it is changing the world. The problem is somebody can take it out of context and use it against you, and we have to guard against that."
Amazon, like many companies, had embraced e-mail as the preferred way to communicate about business matters. Instant, convenient and at least putatively private, it allows the lowliest employee to discourse with the most exalted. And it provokes spontaneous, if not always eloquent, brainstorming among colleagues who might otherwise keep their thoughts to themselves.
Now, Amazon, which to many people symbolizes a progressive Internet culture, is among the growing ranks of companies that are imposing new restrictions on e-mail.
Unlike earlier policies prohibiting abusive or harassing electronic messages, the new rules tend to curb types of expression that have long been deemed acceptable business discourse. And when such exchanges must take place in writing, the prevailing philosophy would have them expunged as quickly and ruthlessly as possible.
This backlash underscores a paradox of the information age: while instantaneous electronic communication often helps increase productivity and innovation, the privacy of workplace correspondence and accountability for what is written are growing concerns for many employers.
Often, e-mail is more a conversation that happens to be written down than an actual letter, and it is often more revealing than either. It has thrived largely because of the assumption -- some would call it the illusion -- that the rapid-fire confessional exchanges that e-mail seems to encourage will never be divorced from their context.
But that is often not the case in legal disputes, where e-mail is increasingly being treated as the ultimate window into the true thoughts of executives and the inner workings of an enterprise.
Among the Microsoft trial's electronic highlights: the company chairman, Bill Gates, in a sworn deposition, flatly contradicts his e-mail statements, and an e-mail from James Barksdale, chief executive of the Netscape Communications Corp., to America Online's chairman, Steve Case, in which he refers to Case as "Franklin D." and himself as "Joseph Stalin" in a strained -- and ultimately embarrassing -- allusion to the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union in World War II.
Likewise, in the Sun Microsystem lawsuit against Microsoft over the Java programming language, a federal court in San Jose, Calif., has seen a great deal of embarrassing e-mail from both companies.
As a result, the very attributes that have made e-mail so popular -- chief among them its tendency to induce off-the-cuff candor -- are driving managers to conclude that its use must be reined in, its tracks dusted over.
"In the past, message-retention policies have been primarily designed for disk space management," said Jim Browning, a senior research analyst at the Gartner Group, a consulting firm. "The new question is how quickly should e-mail be deleted to prevent it from becoming a danger to the organization?"
Browning said that anxious calls from clients had been rising in tandem with headlines about the Microsoft trial. Earlier this month, a client called looking for what he characterized as an "e-mail shredder." Another wanted a "Mission Impossible" e-mail product that would self-destruct the message after it was read. "That option doesn't exist today," Browning said.
The Gartner Group recommends policies that help employees understand what a company considers appropriate business language.
For example, said Joyce Graff, Gartner's research director for the electronic workplace: "You talk about 'fair competition'; you don't talk about 'slaughtering' them. No warfare language. That way you have fewer messages you have to worry about in the files."
As the 83 million Americans who now use e-mail in the workplace know, it is easily and often forwarded, copied and stored in perpetuity on everything from company backup tapes to personal Palm Pilots. The fact that people are disinclined to erase old e-mail has not been lost on lawyers, who routinely request e-mail as part of the discovery process in civil and criminal cases.
Robert Lipstein, a Washington-based antitrust lawyer, said a company's e-mail was a treasure trove of evidence "because that's when you catch people in their unguarded moments." Lipstein, who specializes in subpoenaing computer records from multinational corporations, added, "I've seen e-mail that makes me cringe."
Even so, several executives said they regretted the new atmosphere of deliberation and delicacy.
"It slows down communication if everybody is stopping and thinking about what they write," said Tom Jermoluk, chief executive of At Home, a company that provides Internet access over cable televisionlines. "It's chilling. I don't like it."
Nonetheless, Jermoluk, whose company was dragged into the Microsoft antitrust dispute because of an e-mail message a senior manager had written titled "Gates on the Warpath," said he had instructed the company's lawyer to write a more restrictive policy
The conflicting desires to engage in frank, private communication and to escape public accountability for it are by no means new. Corporations have for decades trashed acres of files -- albeit with the added incentive that paper takes up a lot of space.
And well before the first subpoena for a document, Socrates warned that writing ideas down was a bad idea because, among other things, one could never know who might read them. Plato countered that a culture that had to commit everything to memory was limited in its intellectual possibilities.
The quandary of archived records, said Neil Postman, a professor of media studies at New York University, has been around "ever since phonetic writing became a critical part of Western culture."
"Every important new technology is a Faustian bargain," he added.
Increasingly, employers are choosing censorship. More than 20 percent of the respondents in the American Management Association's annual survey this year said that they monitored employee e-mail, compared with 15 percent who said they did so in 1997.
Classes with titles like "e-mail 101" are getting healthy enrollments. Bloomberg, the financial news service, installed a system last month that searches e-mail for offending words. If it finds one, a warning pops up before the e-mail is sent: "This is inappropriate language to use in correspondence with any customer, and a copy of this message will be immediately sent to your superior."
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The conflicting desires to engage in frank, private communication and to escape public accountability aren't new.
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Managers at the Polk Co., a data resource firm in Southfield, Mich., recently discovered that 10 percent of employees had from 5,000 to 10,000 e-mail messages saved on hard drives. A delete-fest is being planned.
"What the Microsoft trial has done is to say that if people are using this as an electronic filing system, it could be a dangerous medium," said David Zaccagnini, Polk's vice president for information technology. "That's what the Microsoft trial really means to corporate America."
Even without formal policies, executives said they were sanitizing their own e-mail.
"I self-consciously tone my language down," said John Gage, chief scientist at Sun.
But Larry Prusak, executive director of IBM's Institute for Knowledge Management, is wary of inhibiting the use of e-mail.
"With e-mail, you get an optimization of a firm's knowledge," Prusak said. "You know Queen Elizabeth I said, 'I don't wish to build windows into men's souls.' That's in a sense what we're beginning to do, and I find it very threatening."
In the wake of the Iran-Contra investigations in which Col. Oliver North's e-mail detailed illegal aid to the Nicaraguan rebels, courts ruled that most government e-mail must be saved as a public record. That has changed attitudes toward e-mail among federal employees.
"There has been an enormous increase in information requests from Congress, which has a very legitimate oversight function," said Sally Katzen, who formerly headed the Clinton administration's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. "But the call for e-mails -- which in many instances are very susceptible to being incomplete, cryptic and misunderstood -- has led a lot of people to shun the use of e-mail, and I think that's most unfortunate."
Indeed, some critics say that unless e-mail comes to be viewed through a more appropriate legal lens, companies, governments and individuals will lose the full benefits of the technology.
"e-mail is perhaps the most contextually sensitive piece of writing that we have, and culturally we're going through this stage where we don't understand how to read it," said Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard University law professor. "The clumsiness that the legal system has in dealing with this will lead to losing some of its value unless we learn how to put it into context and properly weigh it."
Lessig's own personal e-mail became a source of controversy last year when he was named special master by the judge hearing the Microsoft antitrust case. Microsoft contended that he was biased, citing an e-mail message he had sent to a Netscape executive.
"There are people now who will not send me things in e-mail," Lessig said.
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