【英语生活】电邮是个好东西

I am addicted to e-mail. I can tell it's an addiction because I lie to myself about how many hours a day I spend at it, just as I lie about how many units of alcohol I drink. I check messages obsessively through the day and at night, too, when I can't sleep.

I am not concerned about my problem because I love e-mail. It makes my working life better, funnier, richer. I like reading messages and like writing them. I live in a permanent state of excitement that some thrilling e-mail will have arrived next time I check. Even if all I get is a press release and a baffling message from the IT department, never mind. The next batch will surely be better.

Increasingly I find myself in a minority. It now seems quaintly old fashioned to be in
love with e-mail in 2007. The consensus is
that such addiction is unhealthy and that e-mail in general is a curse as much as a blessing. It is a blunt and dangerous instrument, one
that we need to learn to use more deftly and safely.

This view is laid out in the new US business bestseller Send by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe. They start out by asking: why are we so bad at e-mail? Our messages, they claim, tend to be vague, pointless and often damaging. The problem is partly that e-mail is still new, but it's also that we can't see the other person's face, that the blank screen distorts emotion and that we press send without thinking.

There is little here to agree with. For a start, who says we are bad at e-mail? I get a few hundred messages a week, most of them are pretty good. As for my own messages, I'm well satisfied with them, too.

And it is utter tosh to say we are bad at e-mail as it's new: most of us have been at it for hours a day for nearly a decade. If we
had devoted the same amount of time to playing the piano, we'd all be concert pianists by now.

The spontaneity, informality and solitariness of e-mail make it more beguiling than lethal: e-mail tempts us to be ourselves. In business any glimpse of people as they are is worth having, even if the sight isn't pretty.

Take the famous story of the lawyer who e-mailed a secretary asking her to pay a £4 dry cleaning bill to remove a stain on his trousers left by some ketchup she had spilt there. The result: massive public ridicule.

The true problem wasn't that this man sent an e-mail that got forwarded. It was that the e-mail revealed him to be an incredibly mean fellow, who deserved what he got.

This forwarding of e-mails gives a riveting glimpse into the working lives of others. An e-mail gone wrong is a modern equivalent of putting someone in the stocks. Not very pleasant for them, but stimulating for those who throw the
rotten eggs.

The authors draw the standard conclusion that
one should never send a message that might look bad if made public. This is dreary, killjoy advice. If the problem is risk of exposure, that risk is tiny. For every ketchupgate there
are millions of revealing e-mails that daily escape exposure. The pleasure and interest gained seem to compensate for the
modest risk.

Shipley and Schwalbe would be horrified if they had a look into my sent box – not
simply by the gossipy nature of the
messages, but by the sheer number of them. One of their rules says: “If you wouldn't
stop by a colleague's office every 10 minutes for a chat, you probably don't want to e-mail him frivolously 30 times a day.” Oh yes you do.

Neither of the authors can have ever felt the joy of having an e-mail partner at work: someone with one can engage in an endless ping-pong game of repartee. This game only works on e-mail, and I can assure them it is very nice indeed.

On the question of writing style, some of their strict rules coincide with my own prejudices, but I still disapprove on the grounds that e-mails should be allowed to be as different as the people who send them. They favour messages that begin with “Dear –” as do I.
Here are some beginnings I like less, arranged in a crescendo of tastelessness: Hello, Hi, Hallo, Hullo, Hey, Hiya, Hey There. Someone who begins an e-mail “Hey There” is telling me something useful: I am not likely to get on with this person.

Much of the style that the authors like, I hate. They like exclamation marks, which I reject as they make one seem like either a teenager or a Tom Peters wannabe. They approve of messages written in the subject line, with EOM (end of message) after them. I don't. Getting these e-mails is like getting a parcel with nothing inside.

There are only two rules in Send that I wholeheartedly agree with: polite is better than rude, and legal is better than illegal. However, if you need to have these pointed out then I'd like to suggest a rule of my own: your poor mastery of e-mail technique is the least of your problems.

我对电子邮件有些上瘾。之所以确定这是一种瘾，因为对于每天在这上面花了多少时间，我总在自己骗自己，就像我对待每天喝了多少酒这件事一样。我整天着迷一样查阅邮件，在晚上我睡不着觉的时候也会这样。对此我并不担心，因为我喜爱电邮。这让我的工作变得更美好、更有趣、更丰富。我喜欢读邮件，也喜欢写邮件。我处于一种永久兴奋的状态中：一封令人激动的电邮会在我下次查信时出现。即便我收到的只是新闻稿和IT部门发送的莫名其妙的邮件，那也没关系。下一批邮件无疑会更有意思。

我越来越发现，我这种人很少见。现在看来，在2007年才爱上电邮似乎是种奇怪的过时行为。大多数人认为，这种瘾是不健康的，而且电邮一般都是好坏参半。它是一种生硬、危险的工具，我们需要学习如何更灵巧、更安全地使用它。

这种观点在新上市的美国商业畅销书《传送》(Send)中有所体现，该书作者大卫•希普利(David Shipley)和威尔•施瓦尔贝(Will Schwalbe)在书中劈头就问：我们为什么在电子邮件中表现得这么糟糕？他们声称，我们的邮件往往含糊不清、毫无意义，而且往往是有害的。作者认为，部分原因在于电邮仍是个新鲜事物，但也还有其它原因：我们看不到彼此的脸，毫无表情的屏幕扭曲了情感，而且我们不假思索地就点了“发送”按钮。

我并不同意这一点。首先，谁说我们在电邮中表现糟糕了？我每周会收到几百封邮件，绝大多数都相当好。至于我自己发送的邮件，我对它们也非常满意。

因为电邮是个新鲜事物，所以我们就在这方面做得很糟糕？这完全是胡说：我们大多数人每天都要和它打几个小时的交道，而且这么做已将近10 年。如果我们将同样多的时间花在弹钢琴上，那么我们现在都是钢琴演奏家了。

电邮的自发性、随意性和孤独性，使其更具消遣意味，而非致命的威胁感：电邮促使我们表现真实的自己。在职场，观察人们本色的任何一瞥都是值得的，哪怕看到的不很美丽。

讲一个有名的故事：有位律师发电邮给他的秘书，要她支付4英镑干洗费，为的是洗掉她撒在他裤子上的番茄酱污渍。结局？当然是律师遭到了公众的疯狂嘲讽。

真正地问题不在于此人发了一封被转发的邮件，而在于这封邮件暴露出，他是个难以置信的吝啬鬼。他受到嘲讽属于活该。

此类邮件的转发，能让人看到其他人工作中的有趣一面。邮件出问题相当于给某人戴上枷锁。对当事人而言，这不是件高兴事，但却能刺激那些扔臭鸡蛋的人。

该书的作者得出了一个标准化的结论：人们不应发送公开后可能很糟糕的邮件。这是个乏味而又令人扫兴的建议。即使存在曝光的风险，发生这种风险的可能性也是很小的。每发生一次“番茄酱门”事件的同时，每天还有数百万封泄漏秘密的电邮没被曝光。人们从曝光中得到的愉悦和乐趣，似乎足以弥补那种小小的风险。

希普利和施瓦尔贝如果看到我的发件箱，一定会被吓一跳——不仅是因为那些信件内容漫无边际，还因为它们的数量绝对庞大。他们书中的一条规则说：“如果你不会每隔10分钟就到一个同事的办公室里闲聊，那么你可能也不想每天轻率地给他发30封电邮。”噢，我肯定你确实想这么做。

这两位作者都从未感受到工作中有个邮件伙伴的快感：这样的伙伴能让你参与到一种无休止的巧语应答竞赛中。这种竞赛只有通过电邮才能进行，而且我可以担保这种经验非常美妙。

对于写作风格的问题，他们的一些严格规则与我自己的偏好不谋而合，但我仍不赞成，理由是，电邮应该和发送它们的人一样各不相同。两位作者喜欢以“亲爱的XX”开始写信，我也如此。

说一些我不太喜欢的开头语，按照乏味的递进顺序，分别是Hello, Hi, Hallo, Hullo, Hey, Hiya, Hey There。以“Hey There”开头的人告诉我一种有用的信息：我不太可能继续和这个人打交道。

而两位作者喜欢的大多数风格，我都很憎恶。他们喜欢感叹号，而我不喜欢，因为它们让发信者像个小孩，或者像汤姆•彼得斯(Tom Peters)的崇拜者。他们认为信息要写在标题行中，其后还要有消息结尾语EOM。我不这么认为。收到这种电邮，就好像收到一个里边没放东西的包裹。

在《传送》一书所列的规则中，只有两条我完全赞成：礼貌比粗鲁好，合法比非法好。不过，如果你需要有人告诉你这些东西，那么我想告诉你一条我总结出的规则：你在电邮技巧上的糟糕表现，不过是你身上最轻微的一个问题而已。

译者/何黎

《FT商学院》