ELECTRONIC MAIL

Electronic Mail

Electronic Mail

Introduction

This report describes a study of the role of electronic mail (henceforth mail.com) in a specific social and cultural setting: a medium-sized Swedish newspaper office (newsroom) environment. In this context, mail.com has become an important medium for internal communication as well as information exchange with readers and news sources. We particularly focus on the continuous interaction going on at the news desk, i.e. the place where the central planning and coordination of the work at the newspaper takes place. The aim is to describe how mail.com is embedded in the everyday interaction in the newsroom environment, and attempt to provide a picture of what this form of communication means when used for various tasks in this context.

The Architecture of Mail System

Mail.com offers email marketing or bulk email services. Neither of these terms are intended to be synonymous with spam or the sending of unwanted or unsolicited bulk email of a marketing or otherwise offensive nature. Mail.com may provide tracking information showing the status of email sent to each member of an address list. ESPs also often provide the ability to segment an address list into interest groups or categories, allowing the user to send targeted information to people who they believe will value the correspondence.

Research in the past decades has shown the importance of communication for the coordination of work processes, and the emergence of modern management routines through the introduction and use of new media (Yates, 1989). Recent developments in information technology have led to a radical increase in the range of communication forms available. This, in turn, has led to new strands of research about what lies behind the use of different media, and the effects on organizations of new alternative communication forms that are added to the old ones. One important condition for communication in organizations is how the physical environment makes it possible to choose between communication alternatives. If members are located in the same building, there are many options for maintaining contact. Communication can take place face to face, or in mediated form: via stationery or mobile telephones, paper notes, or digitally through mail.com or internal web services. Two partly contradictory perspectives can be distinguished in research about the use of mail.com in relation to other media. One perspective emphasizes that the effects of media are strongly dependent on the inherent properties of the medium—in particular how rich in information the medium is (see e.g. Daft & Lengel 1984; Kahai & Cooper 2003). As a so-called 'lean' medium, mail.com has been considered suitable mainly for simpler forms of communication (Murray 1988, Bälter 1998), while issues that may involve conflict, negotiation and more complex discussions are seen to be more difficult to resolve via mail.com.

This perspective on mail.com and other text-based digital media has been related to the lack of communicative cues (the reduced cues perspective), the lack of social contextual information (social context cues perspective) and a weak perception of the communication partner (social presence theory) (Rice & Love ...