While interviewing for his new job at Wabash, President-elect Pat White told the Wabash staff that "conversation is the lifeblood of a college.
"Today, debates and conversation at Wabash take place not only face-to-face, but also through email. By typing in !everyone as the recipient, any student, professor, or staff member can send a message directly to every person on the Wabash campus. It’s an effective way to disseminate information quickly. It hasn’t proven as effective as a medium for campus debates.
WM asked Associate Professor of Rhetoric David Timmerman, winner of the 2005 McLain-McTurnan-Arnold Award for Excellence in Teaching, to reflect on the benefits and challenges email presents to public conversations in learning communities.
WM: Is there something about email as a medium that makes a good debate more difficult?
Timmerman: The very thing that makes email so appealing also makes it detrimental.
It’s appealing because it’s a low-effort endeavor—if I send you an email message, I am not necessarily going to worry about my grammar usage and syntax. My anticipation, given the medium, is that you will not hold me to a very high standard. That is one reason we like it for informal exchanges. But when we get into a discussion of a really substantive issues, that approach has serious limitations.
So how do you raise an email shouting match to the level of a debate?
At the heart of a good debate are two people advancing claims, giving reasons for their claims, listening to each other, and responding to each of the claims the other person makes. With those elements in place, you can have a very good debate, and I can imagine that sort of debate going on over email, but it is not very likely given the lack of face-to-face interaction.
Now if you’re debating a person face to face, you’re accountable for what you say the moment you say it. You’re accountable to the person you’re debating and to the audience watching the debate.
But there’s a presumed unaccountability in email. I can shoot out an email, leave my computer, and come back a day later. We do not require or necessarily expect that you will remain at your computer and respond to the person you’re engaged with.
In a face-to-face conversation, you would never think of that. If I were going to disagree with you, I would then wait for you to respond to what I had said. If I left, I would be considered rude.
Also, in a face-to-face debate, you have to respond to each argument. In email debates, people just pick and choose the point they want to attack, and it is very hard to hold them accountable for doing so because the various threads get lost in the electronic shuffle.
Professor David Polley had this to say during a recent conversation on the same topic: "Communication is more than words. It’s what you say, but it's also your ability to see the impact of those words on the person you’re speaking with. Communication requires empathy. Email does not allow this.
"Right now email doesn’t allow that empathy, but I can imagine a way in which it could—a way in which people would take as much care with what they send out over email as they do with what they say in person. Senders need to put themselves in the place of the person reading the message—to imagine the person reading it. Empathy can grow from that imagination.
When any new form of communication comes into society, we have to decide what the standards are going to be. That just hasn’t happened with email yet.
We could be a college that takes a lead on this.