Introduction

As the general public increasingly embraces the world of E-mail communication for both personal and professional conversations, E-mail is woven into the fabric of everyday life.  For many, E-mail literally reaches across the globe to family, friends, and colleagues.  Using the Internet, we connect to others, anywhere, anytime.  The impact of E-mail on our lives can and should be incredibly productive and serves to enhance value in personal, professional, and business environments.

The Burden and the Benefit

As a communication tool, E-mail affords the user significant powers.  Similar to the telephone it allows instantaneous delivery of information.  However, unlike a telephone, it is never busy, does not require someone to answer, and allows access for minimal or often negligible cost.  E-mail communication can also be managed asynchronously and responded to at the convenience of the recipient.  Phone systems require voice-messaging services (often at increased cost) to provide similar functionality.

Although E-mail is transmitted in a similar manner to a telephone message, it can be better documented.  Like postal mail it requires a unique address for both the recipient and the sender.  Unlike postal mail, it is easily susceptible to interception or modification without the knowledge of the sender or the recipient.

E-mail can also be printed.  This is an important convenience for practitioners using E-mail to manage patients and maintain a written patient treatment record.  Because the functionality of E-mail depends on using the Internet, copies and records of the messages also reside on servers.  Although the E-mail may be deleted from your computer, the electronic version will survive.  Therefore, a user can neither deny sending or receiving a message.  Because many copies of the message exist in many different environments as the message is transmitted over the Internet, E-mail also has the capacity to be shared (and viewed) beyond the immediate or designated recipient.

Because E-mail is used to stay informed, stay in touch with others, and enhance the effectiveness and productivity of the workplace, many view their initial introduction to E-mail as exhilarating and exciting.  This excitement may be short-lived as overwhelming numbers of messages can, at times, arrive daily in the E-mail inbox.  Often these messages are unsolicited and have little or no value.  Worse yet, they all may require an immediate response.  In this situation, dealing with E-mail is essentially like taking out the garbage or shoveling snow.  It never ends and just keeps piling up until you do something about it.

Overwhelming, unpredictable, and unprecedented information overload is the true culprit.  Modern society welcomes technology in an effort to increase efficiency and effectiveness.  All too often, however, it finds itself drowning in a flood of useless knowledge.  Information overload may come from commercial vendors using intelligence agents and data mining techniques in marketing to users and potential customers (e.g., Doubleclick.com).  Innocent excess may even flow from the individual who makes it a mission to inform everyone about every detail of every aspect of every event with the simple stroke of the "Send" button.

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Citation Number: Vol. 2, No. 2, Page 073