"becoming more literate" I doubt it. While there may be exposure to
more ideas, the hastiness and sloppiness of email detracts from the
intellectual process. People don't seem to pay attention to what
they're reading and writing (I often ask specific questions which are
totally ignored). The hastiness (did you plug in the computer?) wastes
a lot of time. Geoffrey's and Ramesh's comments were so much more
useful just because they took the time.
ECoughlin@aol.com wrote:
>
> So while the growing jargon brought on by online discourse may be degrading the grammatical rules of writing (some might argue with no loss to semantic content), the growing population that is now reading and writing and becoming more literate than would have been else wise is worth the expense. IMHO.
>
> In a message dated Tue, 10 Apr 2001 11:12:09 AM Eastern Daylight Time, Geoffrey Sampson <geoffs@cogs.susx.ac.uk> writes:
>
> <<
> The trouble with Steven Krauwer's suggestion that there is a valid type
> of e-mail which is like "chat" and should properly not be subjected to
> greater quality control than social chat is that the receivers have no
> way of rationing their exposure. Of course social chat with family,
> friends, and work colleagues has an important role in life; it is time-
> consuming, but we can ration our involvement because it is a face to face
> activity, understood to be more appropriate in some settings than others,
> and so forth. On the other hand, many of us spend most of our working
> lives these days at a computer terminal and we have no way of limiting the
> range of people who send us e-mails. If someone had time to spend just
> "chatting" when they were nominally at work, it seems to me they would be
> rather under-employed. I believe there are special electronic facilities
> provided ("Internet Relay Chat"?) for people who want to spend their time
> that way. I continue to feel that people who send e-mail to other
> people's workplace addresses are under a duty to apply the same sort of
> quality control to their messages as they would to letters or inter-office
> memos on paper.
>
> An exception, I do recognize, would be when a particular pair of correspondents
> had established a mutual relationship which might involve chatty messages
> -- then it's obviously up to them how they choose to communicate with
> each other. But the sloppiness in e-mails which Ramesh Krishnamurthy
> alluded to and I took up in response to his message is not, in my experience,
> confined to that sort of scenario. It often occurs in messages from
> complete strangers. That does seem to me to be a subtle kind of selfishness.
>
> Geoffrey Sampson
>
> G.R. Sampson, Professor of Natural Language Computing
>
> School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
> University of Sussex
> Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, GB
>
> e-mail geoffs@cogs.susx.ac.uk
> tel. +44 1273 678525
> fax +44 1273 671320
> web http://www.grsampson.net
>
>
> >>
-- Ken Litkowski TEL.: 301-482-0237 CL Research EMAIL: ken@clres.com 9208 Gue Road Damascus, MD 20872-1025 USA Home Page: http://www.clres.com
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