Conference 7.286::digital

    This guy hasn't a clue that the essence of "office work" is
    communication.  Harping on electronic mail is as stupid as complaining
    that telephones, mail, and meetings all interfere with work.
    
    Also, he's also clueless as to what the communication environment of
    the trading room is.  It's because the electronic infrastructure isn't
    providing needed information that people are shouting across the room,
    not because they like to be hoarse at the end of the day.

    Sounds like a rabid Luddite to me. I do notice that he failed to
    mention the Email that I get in which the distribution and/or routing
    lists are several times the length of the message.

    Jamie.

    Guy probably wears bear skins and eats with stone knives. If not, he
    could be classified as a hypocrite.

>        To  the  extent  that instantaneous e-mail systems  undermine
>these  go-to-meeting,  see-and-be-seen  skills, they are subversive of
>the  real  purpose  of  many  firms,

It seems to me that the professional meeting-going class is also the
one that generates the most turgid, jargon-filled and content-free
E-Mail (with extra-long distribution lists, of course).  I take both
of these as signs of not having enough real work to justify one's job
and hence needing to create a smokescreen of pseudo-activity to hide
this fact. :^)
							- paul

    I too take strong issue with Warsh.  I read his column regularly and
    almost never approve of what he says; this is just one more for the
    prize.
    
    Warsh does however reflect a common perspective on e-mail that we don't
    appreciate:  Within some centralized (geographically, as in "everybody
    works in one buiding") companies, e-mail is less obviously beneficial
    than it is to a worldwide company.  Warsh is obviously upset that some
    folks were using e-mail to talk behind _his_ back.  And he doesn't have
    connectivity to the outside world yet.  (I may check to see if there's
    some kind of Internet or X.400 link to the Glob; most likely, there
    isn't.  If there is, he obviously doesn't use it.)  His column is thus
    spoiled by the bad taste of his personal sour grapes.
    
    On the other hand, it's a good lesson for selling networks.  Just
    because he's wrong doesn't mean that real live (potential) customers
    don't see it his way.

    My first cut at Warsh's column several weeks back was that the
    atmosphere around his office sounded positively POISONOUS.  Was glad I
    didn't work anywhere near him.
    
    My second cut was that he's dreadfully underinformed about the spectrum
    of electronic communications.  We often use EMail as a substitute for
    1-to-1 communications via phone or face-to-face, and this is of course
    crucial for a global company.  We just as often use EMail for
    1-to-several comms, through the use of mailing-lists.  Sometimes these
    are centrally located or maintained, but now we shade into a different
    medium...  One-to-MANY comms, which (though imho often mis-implemented 
    via mailing lists) are best implemented via NEWS or VAXnotes or
    pc-based BBSes.  It is this side of the EComms spectrum that Warsh is
    implicitly complaining he doesn't have.  Were such comms to be
    available and widely used (by example, from top management on down), my
    bet would be that the poisonous atmosphere would gradually become
    breathable again.  Or at least require less high-performance gas-masks
    :-), to strain my metaphor...
    
    Your mileage may vary...
                            

    
    Other things he missed on were:
    
    	Laser printed mail messages.
    
    	Postscript mail printed to ANSI queues
    
    cbc
    

    Perhaps most germain: the guy writes for the Boston Globe. This pretty
    much says it all. 
    
    
    kbs
    

    A few words about David Warsh:  he is a professor of economics at (if
    memory serves) Boston University.  Warsh has written a book about the
    economic consequences of innovation.  His columns are often about
    innovation, and his frequent comparisons of economists to other kinds
    of scientists and engineers are priceless.
    
    No doubt his column was based at least partly on his experiences.  To
    his readers, he is clearly no paper-age Luddite.
    
    Wes Plouff

>  It explains  why  the smartest people continue to prefer to live in cities.

	Once I read this, he lost whatever credibility he had.

					Tom_K

    More half-baked uninformed opinions than I can shake a sharp stick in
    the eye, we'll burn that bridge when we come to it.
    
    karl

    Re .0
    
    Now if Email can shove his blood pressure up that far, how high would
    it go if he discovered something like notes existed? I reckon he might
    just pop his cork.

    Jamie.

    I think you might have missed the point.
    
    E-mail and similar technologies - particularly NOTES!! - offer you and
    I the same opportunity the reporter in .0 has and doesn't want to
    share.  We can reach a larger audience without interruption (in our
    train of thought) and we can be without the hinderances of personality
    (you might hate me and not pay attention), physical presence (people 
    will pay more attention to the better looking speakers) or body
    language (you can't see me wink when I joke or, more importantly, hear
    my voice stress when I lie).
    
    So the guy's an elitist.
    
    Besides, both the worlds he seems to admire - press rooms and trading
    floors - are fantasy (the kindest word I could find).  Nothing is
    produced in either.  Both are filled with self-appointed experts who
    are, virtually without exception, social parasites.
    
    

Give the guy a little credit.  He recognizes that electronic publishing in
the hands of ordinary people like us cuts into his job prospects.  The
centralized "news" (read gossip) publishing business can't compete.  We can
generate 100 rumors while he's waiting for his editor to decide what to run
tonite!

slightly in jest,

Dick

     	 From reading David Warsh's article, I can see that he is a 
     little out of date. Clearly one of the advantages of e-mail is that 
     it links people who are across the globe, thus eliminating the need 
     for people to work and live in close proximity to each other. 
     Without electronic mail, I couldn't get half of my work done. 
     
     	 I take exception to some of his comments.  I grew up near 
     Boston and now live in the country.  I clearly prefer to live in 
     the country and I 'ain't' stupid. :->
     
     	 Actually I'm totally against what he stands for in this 
     article.  I don't like to goto meetings and "do" lunch for the sake 
     of appearance.  These are just a few of the things I don't miss 
     living and working in the country. 
     
     	  Why does he feel that the smartest people want to live in 
     cities?  Why does he feel that face-to-face conversation in 
     meetings, power lunches, open offices environments are most 
     important?  Though I've never heard him speak, I suspect that Mr. 
     Warsh may posses great oratorical skills. He may be an extrovert 
     and feels there is great advantage gained by communicating 
     face-to-face, rather than taking the time to compose your thoughts 
     on a computer screen. 
     
     	  I think he suffers from reading too many Superman Comics when 
     he was a kid.
     
     
     /Bryan 
     

    Hmmm ... Seems to me that the gent may realize that people who read news 
    via e-mail and notes probably don't have as much need for newspapers.
    
    Steve

    The simplest explanations are probably the most accurate ones.
    
    The guy is simply an elitist with a narrow viewpoint, and he found an
    interesting and topical issue on which to write his daily requirement.

>The simplest explanations are probably the most accurate ones.

Simpler yet.  They don't know how to make smiley's in the Globe and we can't
recognize humor without them!

    Gee,  Can you imagine how LITTLE we would know about
    what's happening in this corporation without e-mail and notes?
    
    Makes me shudder to think about it.
    
    Mark

         Re: .many of the previous

         Gee, everyone seems perfectly at home slamming this guy.  As if
         he was a total idiot and, of course, the engineers of the
         system always know what's right. Don't they?  

         I think there's a video in the Digital Library about paradigm
         filtering.  If you slam Warsh by saying he doesn't see the
         advantages, you have done nothing to defeat the strengths of
         the disadvantages that Warsh describes. But then again, he who
         dies with the most messages in his mail folder, must have been
         right. right?

         (My personal opinion is that .0 is heavy on disadvantages,
         perhaps out of ignorance, perhaps out of necessity... I don't
         know for sure and can't ask him at this moment)

         E-Mail is only a new communications medium.  The messages
         remain the same.  The thing that we must understand about the
         new medium is that it is *NOT* perfect. Evolution gave us
         voices and from those voices came language.  If e-mail is such
         a perfect tool then, maybe we can expect the next earth-dominant
         life form to evolve to have builtin RS-232's instead of a
         voice.

         Communication is a side-effect of symbolic exchange and
         cognition. Unfortunately, not all of those symbols can be
         translated into words.  Imagine the Willie Smith trail, if the
         plaintiff and defendant had exchanged mail messages instead of
         lusty glances over a drink.  The less capable a medium is of
         transferring the range of human symbols, the more chance there
         is for introducing errors. We've probably all seen incidence in
         notes where people get pissed off at something. If that same
         thing were said to them face-to-face (with all the body
         language), they might laugh it off.

         Also, I'd like to point out some of the fallacies of what
         technology can do for you.  Remember the push button phone.
         Introduced to make dialing a bit faster. 7 little key presses.
         Think about what you have to go through to dial using a credit
         card in an airport.  do you think of those 20-30 numbers/codes
         as a curse of technology or do you thank god that you don't
         have to do it with a rotary phone? In terms of e-mail, is it a
         curse or a blessing that mis-information can be disseminated at
         the same speed as the truth?

         When I'm not at digital, I work as an actor/writer. I could be
         called an extrovert.  I don't feel threatened by e-mail one
         bit. I use it for it's advantages and forgive its weakness. 
         But I use it out of choice. My choice! It could be the best
         thing since sliced bread, but if I don't value it, then don't
         come trying to ram it don't my throat while waving the banner
         of it's advantages. The advantages you see provide little or no
         illumination to Warsh unless he chooses to see "the light".

         Perhaps the author of .0 simply values communication in a
         medium that is capable of transferring the broadest range of
         human expression. If the breadth of your communication skills
         fits in a  e-mail message, then I say "knock yourself out". I'd
         rather have a smile, than a smiley face.

         later,

         douglas

         ps:  Once upon a time, I'm sure someone resisted writing down
         history using words, the probable defend was "imaging the
         effect it will have on producing shorter memories..."


         ps2:  Note this reply contains none of those smiley faces or
         symbolized-body-language-clues.  Have you missed out on the fun
         I have writing this note?  How do you know if you have or
         haven't? Isn't communication great!

    I would be more inclined to take the guy's opinions on communications
    at face value if he didn't label everybody who lives outside a big city
    an idiot.

    I thought there was one important part of the article.  
    
    
>>        A   larger,  generally  less  recognized  problem  is    that
>>electronic note-passing lends itself to the creation and  maintenance
>>of factions within organizations that would be better off  trying  to
>>dissipate them.    Electronic  communication means that phalanxes are
>>harder to break  apart.  Paranoia becomes a more common fact of life,
>>since you can't see those who are talking about you.
>>        
>>	In the worst case,  the note-passing culture that arises from
>>electronic mail may even lead  to  a  kind of adverse selection, when
>>the  people  who are the most  efficient  message  writers  begin  to
>>facilitate each other's rise to the top.  These secret sharers are not
>>just  off  playing  football on weekends or drinking  together  after
>>work;  rather, they are tapping out messages to  each  other  in real
>>time, completely invisible to those not in on the network.
    
    It reminded me of some of a few notable episodes at DEC, including some
    that had a run in this conference (the DCU episode, for instance; a few
    years back there was something about Car Plans).  (Another non-DEC
    example might be the Prodigy privacy scare a while back).  In fact,
    the DCU episode could have been viewed by the DCU BOD in a similar
    perspective (the word "phalanx" is quite an apt one).
    
    I think he has identified a very real, but nascent, phenomena.  
    
    Imagine if your town's School Committee had a Notes file in which the
    citizenry (those with modems anyway) discussed policy decisions.  On
    the one hand it sounds pretty great; but it also presents a new and
    different dynamic of group decision making.  If such a file existed
    today, it would certainly disenfranchise portions of the voting
    population.  And, it might make the press a bit less powerful in the
    deal (although I doubt Warsh is grinding that axe).
    
    Pervasive implementation of e-mail networks and special-interest
    bulletin boards will happen, and we can speculate about what it will
    feel like.  But noone will stop it.  
    
    It already has a major influence on Working at DEC.  Some of this
    influence is good, some is not.  
    
    In my experience, I have had to adapt my style of work to far more
    interupts over the years.  Indeed, there have been weeks when I can't
    seem to get out of interupt mode.  That's the changing nature of my
    job.  
    
    I have had to learn to make that a strategic advantage: I focus now on
    smaller tasks, but I see them through to immediate conclusion.  
    
    I rely less on "support staff" such as a secretary or financial
    analyst, because these short-turn-around tasks do not allow me to wait
    in someone else's queue.  And of course there is better supporting
    technology so I can do these support-tasks myself.
    
    I like this mode of operation, so I have gravitated toward jobs and
    assignments that involve lots of it, rather than assignments that have
    starts and ends that are months or years apart.  I have worked on lots
    of teams that had international participation.  Even though some of
    these teams lasted a long time, they have been task teams rather than
    standing committees.
    
    I strongly disagree with Warsh that "The  enterprises  most  damaged 
    by  electronic  note-passing systems are those that most value 
    transparency."   It is just the opposite.  The wrinkle is that
    the ante is computer literacy.  If we have a society (either the one
    inside DEC or any of our greater communities) in which there remains a
    division between the literate and the unplugged, then indeed Warsh's
    worries will come true.
    					--djc--
    
    

>>>	In the worst case,  the note-passing culture that arises from
>>>electronic mail may even lead  to  a  kind of adverse selection, when
>>>the  people  who are the most  efficient  message  writers  begin  to
>>>facilitate each other's rise to the top.

	Why is that inherently worse (or better) than a culture in
	which the people who are the most efficient speakers [...]
	rise to the top?

re: .24,
    
>    Imagine if your town's School Committee had a Notes file in which the
>    citizenry (those with modems anyway) discussed policy decisions.  On
>    the one hand it sounds pretty great; but it also presents a new and
>    different dynamic of group decision making.  If such a file existed
>    today, it would certainly disenfranchise portions of the voting
>    population.  And, it might make the press a bit less powerful in the
>    deal (although I doubt Warsh is grinding that axe).

    	I disagree that a public notesfile would disenfranchise portions
    of the voting population any more than a town meeting disenfranchises
    those who can't make it to the meeting for one reason or another.
    Certainly there would initially be problems of providing public
    access to such a notesfile (i.e. people would need a network terminal
    of some sort).  Assuming these issues were provided for in such a
    town meeting system configuration, then the only remaining issue
    would be that of illiteracy.  A minimum of reading and writing skills
    in the chosen language is a prerequisite for noting, but wouldn't be
    for meeting in person.  On the other hand, a minimum of public speaking
    skills are also a prerequisite for effective person to person meetings,
    so there is a trade-off.  To digress even further, due to the distances
    and time constraints involved in assembling for most town meetings, a
    notesfile would provide improved access to a certain degree.

    	In general, there is something about Warsh's column which I feel
    needs to be pointed out, and that is that Warsh doesn't seem to mention
    anything specifically about conferencing software such as notesfiles,
    BBSs, etc.  It is easy to presume from the luddite tone of Warsh's column
    that he would simply lump all software into the same evil category, but
    this is not an established fact.  I myself recall writing similar diatribes
    ranting and raving about the back-stabbing that goes on in secret via
    email messages (possibly even in this notesfile in years past).  At the
    same time however, I could also compare the secret medium of email to
    the open medium of notes (where the only secrets are contained in secret
    or restricted notesfiles - and even these aren't too secret due to DEC's
    policies and procedures concerning notes memberships).  Such a comparison
    might provide a different perspective on Warsh's column.

				   -davo

p.s.	I wonder if Warsh has similar feelings towards the U.S. Mail system?

It seems to me that Warsh would have written something similar about telephones
when they were new.

After all, they interrupt work flow, and need immediate attention.
They cause the decline of writing skills. Before them, letters were the primary
method of communication. The art of letter-writing has declined.
It's much easier to say something that you will regret than to think things
out carefully when writing a letter. 

(The above opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this writer,
his keyboard, or his mouse.)

Steve

Re: .27

I like the telephone analogy, but I think I can do even better.
Parodying shamelessly:

	The manager is hunched over a rock, scraping furiously
at a hide:  then a little chuckle, a rapid-fire series of marks on
a piece of bark.  She slips the bark between a couple of hides, and
the scene is repeated by another manger, across the cave.  The
exchange is quick and utterly invisible.  It is part of a  system
that  is  quietly  damaging many tribes from within.

        The system is, of course, writing, or  "mail" - the
message systems  that  permit written "conversation" between people
who know that there is meaning in those dark marks.  It is growing in
popularity as ever more dyes and stains are combined on bark and hide.
Many tribes are considering trading fresh meat or fruits and berries
for quills and "papyrus";  others having bought message systems, are
engaged  in  debates about whether to keep them.

        Count this column as a vote against.

	One problem with writing is simple.  It is a great time-waster.
After all, it is fun to share secrets, tell jokes, flirt, complain
about fellow-workers' peccadilloes - especially if [you?] can't get
caught.  It is exactly like passing grunts in the forest, except that
no one who can't read can intercept your message . . .


	(The idea just keeps on going!  Just go back to the original
	article and substituting "telephone" or "writing" for "e-mail".
	Only minor changes in the surrounding text, and you have
	a delightful indictment of just about any technology! :-)

				- - Steve

    	There's a very interesting article in the November/December 1991
    issue of _Technology_Review_:
    
    	"Electronic Democracy" by Pamela Varley
    
    	"A public computer network in Santa Monica is providing
    a high-tech way to fight city hall.  But the experiment is still
    in its infancy."  They have provided public terminals in locations
    such as the city library, in addition to employee desktop access
    and modem dialups.  PEN = Public Electronic Network
    
    	Sections:  
    	Pioneering PEN
    	The Lure of Conferences
    	Trouble in Paradise
    	Coping with a Hard Core
    	Breaking New Ground
    
    	The article includes sample conversations, description of the
    original intent, and some positive outcomes--especially an
    ENFRANCHISEMENT of the city's homeless.  
    
    	Very interesting reading!