E-mail and Behavioral Changes by Lagrana Fernando

Author:Lagrana, Fernando
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119285120
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2016-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

6

A Lack of Ethics that Disrupts E-mail Communication

6.1. There is a new behavior behind every technical asset

Electronic mail was one of the very first I nternet-based communication tools and its conception reflects the prevailing sense of community at that time, during the 1970s. It is not a robust system featuring strong security mechanisms.

This is why both the e-mail envelope and the e-mail body are easy to manipulate and modify. Practice shows that users take advantage of (and abuse) the opportunities available for altering both the envelope (list of recipients, time stamp, sender’s address, etc.), and the content (erroneous or truncated quotations, time stamp of received messages, etc.).

Langford [LAN 96] mentions that “what is ethically appropriate must reflect what is technically possible” and it turns out that the technical characteristics of e-mail offer a practically unlimited area for all sorts of unethical behaviors, starting from sending “harmless” jokes that flood a company network and up to organized crime, or from a sheer waste of time and up to friendly, or aggressive, spam.

It should be noted that the users’ lack of experience with this relatively recent communication tool has brought about new behaviors that are sometimes inappropriate for a modern company, in which interpersonal communication plays a central role, and where flattened hierarchy patterns, peer networks and horizontal collaboration are predominant and they require that all stakeholders including leaders, managers, colleagues as well as clients, partners or suppliers acquire new communication skills.

A question then arises. Does a lack of experience explain and justify all these new behaviors? Is failing to learn new tools, particularly when used for professional purposes, ethically reprehensible while this may not necessarily be the case from a legal perspective? And, all things considered, what is the point of bringing ethics into discussion when dealing with a subject as trivial as electronic communication or e-mail?

At this point it may be worth recalling several fundamental notions, before proceeding further with the study of new behaviors that have emerged from ICTs and their ethics-based evaluation.

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