E-Habits by Elizabeth Charnock

Author:Elizabeth Charnock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Published: 2010-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

If you’ve been accused of these tendencies, chances are it’s because you tend to see all of the e-mails, IMs, documents, and so on that you receive as one giant soup of information, in which most bits of data float around freely in the bowl. Those that aren’t just floating in the soup are likely explicitly labeled with the appropriate restrictions. But the digital world is actually segmented into many different fragments that no one expects to intersect with one another, but that sometimes do. For example, you wouldn’t expect to see your grandmother perusing content on a new community website devoted to the local clubbing scene; you assume she’s hanging out at the online senior citizens’ forum. But she may find her way to the clubbing website if there is a picture tagged with your name. Or she might be sleuthing around on an online dating site for twentysomethings and find that Rob1212, who is breathtakingly and memorably specific about the physical attributes he is looking for in a potential date, is you.

A sin of omission that the bull in the digital china shop often commits is not paying enough attention to who his digital audience is. For example, most group e-mail aliases tend to expand over time rather than shrink. At any rate, few such aliases that survive long have an entirely static membership. Many companies offer tools that can list the members of any group e-mail alias of which you are a member. This is an excellent resource to use from time to time or whenever you’re in any doubt about who exactly you are addressing. Nevertheless, it is not always obvious who might have access to a particular part of a wiki or other online content.

There is a nearly infinite number of ways to get into trouble that relate to group e-mail. A common one that often leads to complaints to HR or worse involves porn or dirty jokes being sent to a group e-mail alias for a management team whose obvious members are all male. This may seem safe enough on the surface, even if it flouts corporate policy; after all, it’s usually no worse than the jokes routinely told around the table during the weekly management meetings—except for one small detail. In many companies, the managers’ female administrative assistants, who do not attend those meetings, do receive those e-mails and may not be amused. The potentially fatal scenario is the one in which such an invisible member of the alias is actually the target of inappropriate words—or worse still, pictures.

To combat bull-in-a-china-shop tendencies, you must first consciously define different categories or segments of content you receive. The breakdown can be hierarchical, if that helps: for example, a friends category could be further broken down into basketball friends, work friends, college buddies, former boyfriends, and so on. You might also do this by topic or category of item, such as a party invitation or a church activity announcement. Once this is done, whenever you are

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