Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Communications by email

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

On Thursday, March 20, 2003, at 11:23  AM, Becky Schaller wrote:
>

> I'm wondering if any communities have made any agreements about the 
> kinds of
> messages that are appropriate to be sent by email and those that 
> aren't.
> This comes up periodically here and we've never really come to any 
> kind of
> agreement.   I'm wondering if other communities have.

We have no agreements but we have lots of opinions -- all in conflict.

The only conclusion I have come to is that any conversation that needs 
engagement does not work on email. It works badly in person (unless you 
lock all the doors) but on email people just go away mad, just as it is 
in person, and refuse to engage except to fire off a final ultimatum.

Unless there is someone there to say "is that what you mean?" or "Did 
you hear that correctly?" the emails go in circles or escalates. These 
kinds of discussions need umpires to send everyone to their corners and 
reset the defaults or the issue implodes.

That said, email is the only way some people can raise issues at all -- 
and this is important to realize. My own view is that I want to hear 
how people feel and I want to know that however they can communicate 
it. That is far more valuable to me than "good manners." The reactions 
to emails are usually much more damaging than the original postings. 
The reactors go nuclear and blame their reaction on the original 
poster. In person, the reaction would be to walk away. Not a good 
solution either, in my view, but some do prefer that.

We also have differences of opinion about messages of personal 
sensitivity -- some find email insensitive and want notices of deaths 
and even births to be done not on email. I find this odd because I feel 
it is more important for everyone to know and email is the only way to 
do that without a phone tree that takes days to complete. One of our 
members made a mission out of talking with each member personally about 
an issue and it took her three days, full focus. Not many of us have 
that kind of time.

I was very hurt when one of our member's cherished dog died and she 
didn't want it announced on email. She was devastated and I didn't even 
know about it for a month. Many others also did not know.

In another instance we had the birth of twins and a request to not 
communicate this by email. The situation was hard on me as one of the 
caretakers of the babies because people wanted to know how the babies 
were doing and the mother didn't want visitors. I went against the 
request because I knew people wanted to share this wonderful event. I 
sent daily reports on their personalities and activities and how the 
mother was feeling. When one of the twins died, these missives became 
very important to the mother. A year later she still reads them. I also 
sent messages about the death because it was the only way to reach 
people quickly. I deleted these messages from the archives so she 
wouldn't stumble over them later and told her about them so she 
wouldn't read her email. She said she understood and wouldn't read 
them. She did, I found out later, read them. It was very helpful to her 
in being able to go back and review what happened when and who did 
what. She needed to reconstruct the events since she needed to 
understand, or to feel that she understood the events of that week.

Email is a wonderful convenience and its downsides are the same 
downsides of any communications with another person or group of 
persons. The problem is not email, but the pitfalls of actually 
communicating with each other. Cohousing certainly would not be where 
it is today without email. Nor would I.

Sharon
-----
Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org

_______________________________________________
Cohousing-L mailing list
Cohousing-L [at] cohousing.org  Unsubscribe  and other info:
http://www.cohousing.org/cohousing-L