Telltales and Overhearers: Participant Roles in Electronic Mail Communication

Abstract

Over the last decade a wide range of technologies such as electronic mail, news groups, bulletin boards, ‘talk’ facilities, shared drawing spaces and video conferencing systems have been developed to support communication amongst colleagues. All these new communication technologies ‘differ from earlier ones in the greater degree to which, through computer processing power, they span space, time and pre-existing social arrangements’ (Sproull and Kiesler 1991). Of all the computer based technologies used to support cooperative work, electronic mail (e-mail) is by far the most widespread and the best established. However, it is still a relatively new technology and, in addition to the obvious benefits of allowing colleagues to span space and time with their messages, the fact that e-mail use involves the negotiation of a new type of social arrangement brings with it a number of unresolved challenges.¹ (See also Rosenberg, this volume, for a discussion of the sociolinguistic dimension of CSCW.)