Why email is like fast food

Email has some tangible advantages over real-time communications such as phone calls or face-to-face conversations. To me personally, the main advantage is the ability to respond to emails at a convenient time. There is also an opportunity to pause before hitting the “Send” button, to re-read my response and to edit it if needed.

But this very feature of taking the conversation off-line, the ability to make it less spontaneous, also tremendously detracts from the depth of the communication. I recently listened to an interview with Prof. Sherry Turkle, who wrote a book about this called “Reclaiming Conversation”. Most points that she makes seem obvious in retrospect, but they are easy to overlook in the everyday life.

She draws an analogy between human desire for genuine communication with cravings for food – both are results of our evolution as social and biological beings. Just like it is convenient to satisfy food cravings by grabbing a quick bite at a fast food joint, so it is appealing to satisfy our craving for communication by periodically checking and replying to emails. Also, eating fast food is not necessarily a social event, and similarly, the non-spontaneous nature of email exchanges appeals to the introverts among us. However, just as a cup of soda with a serving of French fries are not a true substitute to a three-course meal at a fine restaurant, so the snippets of online communication cannot replace face-to-face conversations, as uncomfortable and inefficient the latter may seem in comparison.

According to Dr. Turkle, research shows that real, meaningful human connections strongly depend on face-to-face interactions. Ultimately, the quality of communications, even if we consider only one aspect of it, such as information exchange, is increased if they happen face-to-face. As an engineer, I believe there is a balance between efficiency and effectiveness should be considered here, but there are implications of the importance of meaningful personal contact in nearly all areas of our lives.

For myself, how these principles apply in my academic life are obvious, as I mentioned at the beginning. For example, it is well known that quality of teaching is directly proportional to the amount of face-to-face contact with students. In terms of research collaborations too, it is common knowledge that you don’t have a real working relationship with a colleague until you have a meal together, preferably with some alcohol.

In photography also, I find that it is easy to overlook the importance of human relationship (with the clients, the models, the colleagues, the audience) in the continuous pursuit of efficiency and optimization of the production process. I wrote before that it necessary to provide and seek feedback to and from models during a photo shoot. Likewise, many full-time professional portrait photographers agree that building long-term relationships with clients involves learning about them as people, educating them about photography, personally delivering the final photos to them, etc.

Certainly, all this takes time and effort, but it could be argued that all we do in our lives is communicate with other people on various levels, so we might as well keep the quality of the interactions high and not live our entire lives in a superficial, online mode.