Software interpretation of human communication and its discontents
I found myself using Google Mail today, having joined a company that uses it as its e-mail system. Aside from my typical frustration with the bloated, slow and browser-dependent interfaces sported by modern webmail programs, I was specifically annoyed that Google Mail, by default, hides part of the e-mail that I'm working on: namely, the signatures and quoted material. As a result, I found myself reading and sending e-mail messages without being sure how they appeared on the receiver's screen.
By coincidence, I also received an e-mail today from a friend apologising for the poor formatting of her previous e-mail. Apparently it looked fine in her e-mail client, but it was garbled by other people's clients (including mine). I recently received another e-mail with a signature containing two different e-mail addresses for the sender, one obviously wrong.
My experience with Google Mail illustrates why this might have happened: the e-mail clients of the victims in the above stories presented a view of an -mail that they deemed helpful, while other people's e-mail clients presented views that those clients deemed helpful.
The views disagreed. Instead of presenting the "true" content of the e-mail, the e-mail clients involved have presented their own interpretation of it. (By "true", I mean the universally-agreed encoding of e-mail messages, being plain text or at least HTML.) And, in doing so, the e-mail clients foiled human communication.
Regarding my particular complaint, I suppose that Google Mail's developers think they are being helpful by automatically eliminating "extraneous" information like quoted messages and signatures. As I said in my previous post, I'm all for eliminating useless distractions from user interfaces. But if signatures and quotes really are useless distractions, why include them in an e-mail in the first place?
I'm part of what seems to be a dwindling minority of people who adhere to the custom of selectively quoting the e-mails to which we reply. Once upon a time, Internet users would have been appalled at the wholesale quoting of earlier e-mails that seems to be current practice. If you're not going to use it, we thought, delete it and save the space.
Now, Internet bandwidth isn't as precious as it used to be, and one might say that only hoary old nerds would cling to byte-pinching practices developed in the days of 2400 baud modems. But I nonetheless think that selective quoting serves a more human purpose: it foregrounds what is important to the communication, and eliminates what is not.
Interventionist features like Google Mail's seem to me to at once encourage lazy communicators to fill their e-mails full of junk in the expectation that their software will correct it for them, and to frustrate careful communicators by making them fight against their software in order to send the message that they want to send. The winner is poor communication.
