Sunday, October 21, 2007

The Technology Trap For Talking Takes a Toll

A recent Harris Interactive survey for Whitepages.com released findings on what communication modes are most open to misunderstanding. Not surprisingly, 80% of adults found it most easy to misinterpret the tone of e-mail. Seventy-eight percent found text messages to be misleading, while 71% could also be put off by letters. Consider this: all these modes are flat, one-sided genres that allow the reader to intuit just about anything into the mix.

In our crazy busy world, how often do we automatically push the send key and instantly regret that action? Or how about the mistake of using upper case letters and the reader thinks he is being shouted at? Then too, in the rush to respond and be brief, single line messages can come across as terse, harsh and often View the rest of this article


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