Discourse on e-mail in use

Abstract

This paper, which is drawn upon three empirical studies, focuses on key features of the discourse around e-mail in a professional context. The present discussion is inspired by Michel Foucault's concept of disciplinary power. The paper illustrates how using e-mail maintains an analytical space, a discipline of classifying, measuring, comparative order, experiments and small penalty systems. Using e-mail in the context of this discipline, however, has problems. One such problem, illuminated in the paper, is overload. It is proposed that, as a result of the large amount of e-mail, users either let themselves be encompassed by the same disciplinary power that leads to the overload problems, or they start a syntactical reorganization of how to organize so much e-mail. © 2003 by Springer Science+Business Media New York.