Email Winners and Losers

Abstract

Email has been characterized as both a killer app for the Internet and the "unexciting and mundane electronic medium we love to hate" [1]. Though this appraisal seems paradoxical, it reflects the findings of several studies my colleagues and I completed over the past seven years investigating the role email plays in task performance, socialization, and interpersonal influence. Not surprisingly, we love email when it helps us and hate it when it hurts us. The problem my research highlights is the unexpected difficulty we have applying familiar communication metaphors to predict the outcomes of email communication.