Emails and text messages possess characteristics of letters, memoranda, and the telephone. They have also acquired new ones, including the integration of personal and business styles/formats, insertion of personal with business content, single issue responses, unreflective content, and minimalistic data. As a result, electronic messages tend to be "information poor," writer rather than reader oriented, and asynchronous. This session discusses these findings and applies them to new cases, including the 2015 Chicago landslide and General Motors switch incident. We will also discuss the major problems inherent in communicating electronically and provide suggestions for overcoming them.
