Academic literature on the topic 'Political aspects of Electronic mail messages'

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of brand love in place brand communication by incorporating potential antecedents and behavioral outcomes of place brand love in a social media setting. Design/methodology/approach Data were gathered from 281 residents and visitors of a place through an online survey focusing on a place brand video. Structural equation modeling was employed to examine the research model. Findings Results show that place brand love has a strong direct relationship with positive word of mouth (WOM), and an indirect effect on intention to share the place brand message. Self-expressiveness of the place brand message also seems to influence place brand love as well as intention to share the message. Research limitations/implications The role of self-related concepts and brand love to a place has theoretical implications for research in place branding and electronic word of mouth. The study has limitations to its generalizability in terms of cultural aspects and sample representativeness. Practical implications Place marketers need to successfully reflect the self-concept of key stakeholders in communication messages in order to increase the probability that recipients will engage in positive WOM and share the message. Originality/value Research on place brand love is scarce and previous studies have focused solely on brand love in connection to tourists. The main contribution of the current study is the exploration of the role of brand love in connection to residents, who are vital co-creators of the place brand.

Language has a vital function in many different aspects such as social, military, economic, and even politics. Advertisement functions as media of promotion in transferring particular message from advertisers as the addressors to consumers as a target of the advertisement. The messages are meant to persuade consumers or people to choose a certain political party promoting its vision and mission. In addition, an advertisement covers all aspects of life as displayed in newspaper, television, direct mail, radio, magazines, internet and billboards.mIn this case, people can build a social community and use language as a means of delivering messages. This discusses one of the elements of political field as a subject matter of the discussion, the advertisements of political party in particular. In making advertisement, the political parties have to be creative in order to attract people‘s attention. With reference to the discussion of this research, the writer analyzes the advertisements of political parties major mass media.

The modern society, having entered a way of postindustrial (information) progress, has unlimited access to various information technologies. The modern person can’t imagine his life without Internet network, mobile communication and instant messages, e-mail, electronic payments and credit cards. However, «simplification» of modern human life entails set of infringements in the sphere of constitutional and civil human rights. The basic feature of legal regulation of the right of a citizen of the Russian Federation on the storage and distribution of personal data in terms of social development and world globalization is conformity of laws to basic issues of the Constitution of the Russian Federation and practical applicability.

Background There is growing interest in identifying and recruiting research participants from health systems using electronic health records (EHRs). However, few studies have described the practical aspects of the recruitment process or compared electronic recruitment methods to in-person recruitment, particularly across health systems. Objective The objective of this study was to describe the steps and efficiency of the recruitment process and participant characteristics by recruitment strategy. Methods EHR-based eligibility criteria included being an adult patient engaged in outpatient primary or bariatric surgery care at one of 5 health systems in the PaTH Clinical Research Network and having ≥2 weight measurements and 1 height measurement recorded in their EHR within the last 5 years. Recruitment strategies varied by site and included one or more of the following methods: (1) in-person recruitment by study staff from clinical sites, (2) US postal mail recruitment letters, (3) secure email, and (4) direct EHR recruitment through secure patient web portals. We used descriptive statistics to evaluate participant characteristics and proportion of patients recruited (ie, efficiency) by modality. Results The total number of eligible patients from the 5 health systems was 5,051,187. Of these, 40,048 (0.8%) were invited to enter an EHR-based cohort study and 1085 were enrolled. Recruitment efficiency was highest for in-person recruitment (33.5%), followed by electronic messaging (2.9%), including email (2.9%) and EHR patient portal messages (2.9%). Overall, 779 (65.7%) patients were enrolled through electronic messaging, which also showed greater rates of recruitment of Black patients compared with the other strategies. Conclusions We recruited a total of 1085 patients from primary care and bariatric surgery settings using 4 recruitment strategies. The recruitment efficiency was 2.9% for email and EHR patient portals, with the majority of participants recruited electronically. This study can inform the design of future research studies using EHR-based recruitment.

The purpose of the work is to establish criminologically significant information about the relationship between the dynamics of opium expansion of Afghan origin and the heroin drug situation in Russia. The methodological basis is the method of SWOT analysis and four-element strategic PEST analysis (Policy — policy, Economy — economy, Society — society, Technology — technology), implemented to identify and study the political, economic, socio-cultural and technological aspects of the development of the object under study. Consideration of the correlation relationship led to the conclusion that active international, cross-border and interagency cooperation reduces the “heroin pressure” on the Russian Federation along the «northern route» of drug trafficking. This interaction serves as a point-by-point combination of political efforts to normalize the opium drug situation in the Central Asian region. In turn, the growing popularity of synthetic drugs reduces the demand for plant-based opium drugs. The consequences of the transformation of drug trafficking routing are noted. It was found that the increased risks of detaining drug traffickers and the overall unprofitability of the contact method of distributing heroin led to the widespread use of international mail channels, mobile communications and electronic communications. The practical significance of structuring the correlation under consideration through four aspects makes it possible to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of the domestic mechanism for combating illicit trafficking in opium drugs.

Mobile In many countries, more people have mobile phones than they do fixed-line phones. Mobile phones are one of the fastest growing technologies ever, outstripping even the internet in many respects. With the advent and widespread deployment of digital systems, mobile phones were used by an estimated 1, 158, 254, 300 people worldwide in 2002 (up from approximately 91 million in 1995), 51. 4% of total telephone subscribers (ITU). One of the reasons for this is mobility itself: the ability for people to talk on the phone wherever they are. The communicative possibilities opened up by mobile phones have produced new uses and new discourses (see Katz and Aakhus; Brown, Green, and Harper; and Plant). Contemporary soundscapes now feature not only voice calls in previously quiet public spaces such as buses or restaurants but also the aural irruptions of customised polyphonic ringtones identifying whose phone is ringing by the tune downloaded. The mobile phone plays an important role in contemporary visual and material culture as fashion item and status symbol. Most tragically one might point to the tableau of people in the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, or aboard a plane about to crash, calling their loved ones to say good-bye (Galvin). By contrast, one can look on at the bathos of Australian cricketer Shane Warne’s predilection for pressing his mobile phone into service to arrange wanted and unwanted assignations while on tour. In this article, I wish to consider another important and so far also under-theorised aspect of mobile phones: text. Of contemporary textual and semiotic systems, mobile text is only a recent addition. Yet it is already produces millions of inscriptions each day, and promises to be of far-reaching significance. Txt Txt msg ws an acidnt. no 1 expcted it. Whn the 1st txt msg ws sent, in 1993 by Nokia eng stdnt Riku Pihkonen, the telcom cpnies thought it ws nt important. SMS – Short Message Service – ws nt considrd a majr pt of GSM. Like mny teks, the *pwr* of txt — indeed, the *pwr* of the fon — wz discvrd by users. In the case of txt mssng, the usrs were the yng or poor in the W and E. (Agar 105) As Jon Agar suggests in Constant Touch, textual communication through mobile phone was an after-thought. Mobile phones use radio waves, operating on a cellular system. The first such mobile service went live in Chicago in December 1978, in Sweden in 1981, in January 1985 in the United Kingdom (Agar), and in the mid-1980s in Australia. Mobile cellular systems allowed efficient sharing of scarce spectrum, improvements in handsets and quality, drawing on advances in science and engineering. In the first instance, technology designers, manufacturers, and mobile phone companies had been preoccupied with transferring telephone capabilities and culture to the mobile phone platform. With the growth in data communications from the 1960s onwards, consideration had been given to data capabilities of mobile phone. One difficulty, however, had been the poor quality and slow transfer rates of data communications over mobile networks, especially with first-generation analogue and early second-generation digital mobile phones. As the internet was widely and wildly adopted in the early to mid-1990s, mobile phone proponents looked at mimicking internet and online data services possibilities on their hand-held devices. What could work on a computer screen, it was thought, could be reinvented in miniature for the mobile phone — and hence much money was invested into the wireless access protocol (or WAP), which spectacularly flopped. The future of mobiles as a material support for text culture was not to lie, at first at least, in aping the world-wide web for the phone. It came from an unexpected direction: cheap, simple letters, spelling out short messages with strange new ellipses. SMS was built into the European Global System for Mobile (GSM) standard as an insignificant, additional capability. A number of telecommunications manufacturers thought so little of the SMS as not to not design or even offer the equipment needed (the servers, for instance) for the distribution of the messages. The character sets were limited, the keyboards small, the typeface displays rudimentary, and there was no acknowledgement that messages were actually received by the recipient. Yet SMS was cheap, and it offered one-to-one, or one-to-many, text communications that could be read at leisure, or more often, immediately. SMS was avidly taken up by young people, forming a new culture of media use. Sending a text message offered a relatively cheap and affordable alternative to the still expensive timed calls of voice mobile. In its early beginnings, mobile text can be seen as a subcultural activity. The text culture featured compressed, cryptic messages, with users devising their own abbreviations and grammar. One of the reasons young people took to texting was a tactic of consolidating and shaping their own shared culture, in distinction from the general culture dominated by their parents and other adults. Mobile texting become involved in a wider reworking of youth culture, involving other new media forms and technologies, and cultural developments (Butcher and Thomas). Another subculture that also was in the vanguard of SMS was the Deaf ‘community’. Though the Alexander Graham Bell, celebrated as the inventor of the telephone, very much had his hearing-impaired wife in mind in devising a new form of communication, Deaf people have been systematically left off the telecommunications network since this time. Deaf people pioneered an earlier form of text communications based on the Baudot standard, used for telex communications. Known as teletypewriter (TTY), or telecommunications device for the Deaf (TDD) in the US, this technology allowed Deaf people to communicate with each other by connecting such devices to the phone network. The addition of a relay service (established in Australia in the mid-1990s after much government resistance) allows Deaf people to communicate with hearing people without TTYs (Goggin & Newell). Connecting TTYs to mobile phones have been a vexed issue, however, because the digital phone network in Australia does not allow compatibility. For this reason, and because of other features, Deaf people have become avid users of SMS (Harper). An especially favoured device in Europe has been the Nokia Communicator, with its hinged keyboard. The move from a ‘restricted’, ‘subcultural’ economy to a ‘general’ economy sees mobile texting become incorporated in the semiotic texture and prosaic practices of everyday life. Many users were already familiar with the new conventions already developed around electronic mail, with shorter, crisper messages sent and received — more conversation-like than other correspondence. Unlike phone calls, email is asynchronous. The sender can respond immediately, and the reply will be received with seconds. However, they can also choose to reply at their leisure. Similarly, for the adept user, SMS offers considerable advantages over voice communications, because it makes textual production mobile. Writing and reading can take place wherever a mobile phone can be turned on: in the street, on the train, in the club, in the lecture theatre, in bed. The body writes differently too. Writing with a pen takes a finger and thumb. Typing on a keyboard requires between two and ten fingers. The mobile phone uses the ‘fifth finger’ — the thumb. Always too early, and too late, to speculate on contemporary culture (Morris), it is worth analyzing the textuality of mobile text. Theorists of media, especially television, have insisted on understanding the specific textual modes of different cultural forms. We are familiar with this imperative, and other methods of making visible and decentring structures of text, and the institutions which animate and frame them (whether author or producer; reader or audience; the cultural expectations encoded in genre; the inscriptions in technology). In formal terms, mobile text can be described as involving elision, great compression, and open-endedness. Its channels of communication physically constrain the composition of a very long single text message. Imagine sending James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake in one text message. How long would it take to key in this exemplar of the disintegration of the cultural form of the novel? How long would it take to read? How would one navigate the text? Imagine sending the Courier-Mail or Financial Review newspaper over a series of text messages? The concept of the ‘news’, with all its cultural baggage, is being reconfigured by mobile text — more along the lines of the older technology of the telegraph, perhaps: a few words suffices to signify what is important. Mobile textuality, then, involves a radical fragmentation and unpredictable seriality of text lexia (Barthes). Sometimes a mobile text looks singular: saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or sending your name and ID number to obtain your high school or university results. Yet, like a telephone conversation, or any text perhaps, its structure is always predicated upon, and haunted by, the other. Its imagined reader always has a mobile phone too, little time, no fixed address (except that hailed by the network’s radio transmitter), and a finger poised to respond. Mobile text has structure and channels. Yet, like all text, our reading and writing of it reworks those fixities and makes destabilizes our ‘clear’ communication. After all, mobile textuality has a set of new pre-conditions and fragilities. It introduces new sorts of ‘noise’ to signal problems to annoy those theorists cleaving to the Shannon and Weaver linear model of communication; signals often drop out; there is a network confirmation (and message displayed) that text messages have been sent, but no system guarantee that they have been received. Our friend or service provider might text us back, but how do we know that they got our text message? Commodity We are familiar now with the pleasures of mobile text, the smile of alerting a friend to our arrival, celebrating good news, jilting a lover, making a threat, firing a worker, flirting and picking-up. Text culture has a new vector of mobility, invented by its users, but now coveted and commodified by businesses who did not see it coming in the first place. Nimble in its keystrokes, rich in expressivity and cultural invention, but relatively rudimentary in its technical characteristics, mobile text culture has finally registered in the boardrooms of communications companies. Not only is SMS the preferred medium of mobile phone users to keep in touch with each other, SMS has insinuated itself into previously separate communication industries arenas. In 2002-2003 SMS became firmly established in television broadcasting. Finally, interactive television had arrived after many years of prototyping and being heralded. The keenly awaited back-channel for television arrives courtesy not of cable or satellite television, nor an extra fixed-phone line. It’s the mobile phone, stupid! Big Brother was not only a watershed in reality television, but also in convergent media. Less obvious perhaps than supplementary viewing, or biographies, or chat on Big Brother websites around the world was the use of SMS for voting. SMS is now routinely used by mainstream television channels for viewer feedback, contest entry, and program information. As well as its widespread deployment in broadcasting, mobile text culture has been the language of prosaic, everyday transactions. Slipping into a café at Bronte Beach in Sydney, why not pay your parking meter via SMS? You’ll even receive a warning when your time is up. The mobile is becoming the ‘electronic purse’, with SMS providing its syntax and sentences. The belated ingenuity of those fascinated by the economics of mobile text has also coincided with a technological reworking of its possibilities, with new implications for its semiotic possibilities. Multimedia messaging (MMS) has now been deployed, on capable digital phones (an instance of what has been called 2.5 generation [G] digital phones) and third-generation networks. MMS allows images, video, and audio to be communicated. At one level, this sort of capability can be user-generated, as in the popularity of mobiles that take pictures and send these to other users. Television broadcasters are also interested in the capability to send video clips of favourite programs to viewers. Not content with the revenues raised from millions of standard-priced SMS, and now MMS transactions, commercial participants along the value chain are keenly awaiting the deployment of what is called ‘premium rate’ SMS and MMS services. These services will involve the delivery of desirable content via SMS and MMS, and be priced at a premium. Products and services are likely to include: one-to-one textchat; subscription services (content delivered on handset); multi-party text chat (such as chat rooms); adult entertainment services; multi-part messages (such as text communications plus downloads); download of video or ringtones. In August 2003, one text-chat service charged $4.40 for a pair of SMS. Pwr At the end of 2003, we have scarcely registered the textual practices and systems in mobile text, a culture that sprang up in the interstices of telecommunications. It may be urgent that we do think about the stakes here, as SMS is being extended and commodified. There are obvious and serious policy issues in premium rate SMS and MMS services, and questions concerning the political economy in which these are embedded. Yet there are cultural questions too, with intricate ramifications. How do we understand the effects of mobile textuality, rewriting the telephone book for this new cultural form (Ronell). What are the new genres emerging? And what are the implications for cultural practice and policy? Does it matter, for instance, that new MMS and 3rd generation mobile platforms are not being designed or offered with any-to-any capabilities in mind: allowing any user to upload and send multimedia communications to other any. True, as the example of SMS shows, the inventiveness of users is difficult to foresee and predict, and so new forms of mobile text may have all sorts of relationships with content and communication. However, there are worrying signs of these developing mobile circuits being programmed for narrow channels of retail purchase of cultural products rather than open-source, open-architecture, publicly usable nodes of connection. Works Cited Agar, Jon. Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone. Cambridge: Icon, 2003. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill & Wang, 1974. Brown, Barry, Green, Nicola, and Harper, Richard, eds. Wireless World: Social, Cultural, and Interactional Aspects of the Mobile Age. London: Springer Verlag, 2001. Butcher, Melissa, and Thomas, Mandy, eds. Ingenious: Emerging youth cultures in urban Australia. Melbourne: Pluto, 2003. Galvin, Michael. ‘September 11 and the Logistics of Communication.’ Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 17.3 (2003): 303-13. Goggin, Gerard, and Newell, Christopher. Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Digital in New Media. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Harper, Phil. ‘Networking the Deaf Nation.’ Australian Journal of Communication 30. 3 (2003), in press. International Telecommunications Union (ITU). ‘Mobile Cellular, subscribers per 100 people.’ World Telecommunication Indicators <http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/> accessed 13 October 2003. Katz, James E., and Aakhus, Mark, eds. Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2002. Morris, Meaghan. Too Soon, Too Late: History in Popular Culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis: U of Indiana P, 1998. Plant, Sadie. On the Mobile: The Effects of Mobile Telephones on Social and Individual Life. < http://www.motorola.com/mot/documents/0,1028,296,00.pdf> accessed 5 October 2003. Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book: Technology—schizophrenia—electric speech. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Goggin, Gerard. "‘mobile text’" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/03-goggin.php>. APA Style Goggin, G. (2004, Jan 12). ‘mobile text’. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/03-goggin.php>

The advent of new media has altered the information dynamics that shape public discourse. Convergence, miniaturization, personalization, interactivity, and mobility have blurred the boundaries between producers, consumers, and regulators of information. The role and impact of old mass media such as radio, television and the press, has changed as a result of their interaction with electronic mail, cellular phones, digital cameras, among others. Through an examination of public discourse surrounding Star Academy, the most popular and most controversial program in Arab television history, this article explores how dynamics of information among different media have shaped the Arab public sphere. Based on five months of fieldwork in 2004, the analysis focuses on electronic fatwas, press commentary, new legislation to “protect morality”, SMS messages from fans, cellular phone voting, participatory television talk–shows, and media marketing strategies. The article examines new articulations among political, cultural religious and commercial factors that have been enabled by new technologies and the impact of these interactions on Arab public discourse. The analysis suggests a model of inter–media dynamics.

The Language in the Workplace project, based in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, has for most of its history concentrated on oral interaction in professional and manufacturing organisations. Recently, however, the project team widened its scope to include an introductory investigation of e-mail as a mode of workplace interaction. The ultimate intention is to extend the project's purview to encompass all written modes, thereby allowing a fuller focus on the complex interrelationships between communication media in the workplace. The Problems of Communication In an illuminating recent study, John Durham Peters explores problems that have dogged the notion of 'communication' (the term in this sense originating only in the late nineteenth century) from the time of Plato. The overarching historical problem he discusses is the recurrent desire for complete communication, the illusionary dream of transferring completely and without modification any idea, thought, or intention from one mind to another. There are two further and related problems that are particularly germane to my purposes here. A belief, at one extreme, that communication 'technologies' will interfere with the 'natural' processes of oral face-to-face interaction; together with its obverse, that communications plural (new technologies) will solve the problems of communication singular (self-other relations). A notion that dissemination (communication from one to many)1 is an inferior and distorting mode, inherently deterministic, compared with the openness of (preferably one-on-one) dialogue. Perhaps first formulated in Plato's Phaedrus, this lament has reverberated ever since, radio providing the instance par excellence.2 Yet another problem are the oppositions creating and sustaining these perceived problems, and their resultant social polarisations. Peters argues eloquently that technologies will never solve the differences in intention and reception amongst socially and therefore differentially positioned interlocutors. (Indeed, he counts it as a benefit that human beings cannot exempt themselves from the recognition and negotiation of individual and collective difference.) And he demonstrates that dialogue and dissemination are equally subject to imperfections and benefits. However, the perceptions remain, and that brings its own problems, given that people continue to act on the basis of unrealistic assumptions about communication. Looked at in this context, electronic mail (which Peters does not include in his historical studies) is a particularly fruitful site of investigation. I will focus on discussing the two problems enumerated above with reference to some of the academic and business literature on e-mail in the workplace; a survey conducted in part of a relatively large organisation in Wellington; and a public e-mail forum of primarily scientists and business people concerning New Zealand's future development. Communicative Distortion The first communication technology to be extensively critiqued for its corruption of social intercourse was writing (by Socrates in Phaedrus). Significantly, e-mail has often been characterised, not unreasonably, as a hybrid of speech and writing, and as returning written communication in the workplace toward the 'immediacy' and 'simplicity' of speech. In fact, as many practitioners do not sufficiently appreciate, informality and intimacy in e-mail communication have to be worked at. Efforts are made by some to use friendly salutations; a chatty, colloquial style; typographical representations of body language; and to refrain from tidying up errors and poor expression (which backfires on them when addressing sticklers for correctness, or when, as often happens, the message is full of obscurities and lacunae). When these attempts are not made, receivers impute to the messages the coldness and impersonality of the most functional letters and notes -- and this is only enhanced by the fact that so much e-mail in the workplace is used for directives (instructions and requests) or announcements (more specifically, proclamations; see below). In contrast to the initial reception of some earlier communication technologies, e-mail was widely welcomed at first. It was predicted to usher in a new egalitarian and democratic order of communication by flattening out or even by-passing hierarchical relations (Sproull and Kiesler; any issue of Wired magazine [see Frau-Meigs]). The realisation that other commercial factors were also contributing to this flattening out no doubt helped to dispel the utopian view (Casey; Gee)3. Subsequent literature has given more emphasis to the sinister aspects of e-mail -- its deployment by managers in the surveillance, monitoring, and performance measurement of employees, its capacity to support convenient and efficient reporting regimes, its durability, and its traceability (Brigham and Corbett; Corbett). This historical trajectory in attitudes towards, and uses of, e-mail, together with the potential variation in the readers' interpretations of the writer's feelings, means that people are quite as likely to conceive of e-mail as cold and impersonal as they are to impute to it more positive feelings. This is borne out in the organisational survey carried out as a part of this research. Of the respondents working in what I will call a professional capacity, 50 percent (the same proportion for both male and female) agreed that e-mail creates a friendlier environment, while only a small percentage of the remainder were neutral. Most disagreed. Interestingly, only a third of clerical staff agreed. One can readily speculate that the differences between these two occupational classes were a significant factor with regard to the uses e-mail is put to (more information sharing as equals on the part of professionals). Those who felt that e-mail contributed to a less friendly environment typically referred to the 'loss of personal contact', and to its ability to allow people to distance themselves from others or 'hide behind' the technology. In a somewhat paradoxical twist of this perceived characteristic, it appears that e-mail can reinforce the prevailing power relations in an organisation by giving employees a way of avoiding the (physical) brunt of these relations, and therefore of tolerating them. Employees have the sense that they can approach a superior through e-mail in a way that is both comfortable for the employee (not have to physically encounter their superior or, as one informant put it, "not have to cope with the boss's body language"), and convenient for the superior.4 At the same time, interestingly, respondents to our surveys have generally been adamant that e-mail is not the medium for conflict resolution or discussion of significant or sensitive matters pertaining to a manager's relationship with an individual employee. In the large Wellington service organisation surveyed for this study, 70% of the sample said they never or almost never used e-mail for these purposes. It was notable, however, that for professional employees, where a gender distinction used in the survey, 80% of women were of this view, compared with 60% of men. Indeed, nearly 10% of men reported using e-mail frequently for conflict resolution purposes. In sum, there is the potential in e-mail for a fundamental distortion; one that is seemingly the opposite of the anti-technologists' charge of corruption of communication by writing (but arguably with the same result), and one that very subtly contradictory, appearing to support, the utopianism of the digerati. The conventions of e-mail can allow employees to have a sense of participation and equality while denying them any real power or influence over important matters or directions of the organisation. E-mail, in other words, may allow co-workers to communicate across underlying tensions and conflicts by effectively suppressing conflict. This may have advantages for enabling an organisation's work to continue in the face of inevitable personality differences. It may also damage the chances of sustaining effective workplace relationships, especially if individuals generalise their use of e-mail, rather than selecting strategically from all the communicational resources available to them. Dialogue and Dissemination Notwithstanding the point made earlier in relation to radio about the flexibility of technology as a societal accomplishment (see note 2), e-mail, I suggest, is unique in the extent of its inherent ability to alternate freely between both poles of the dialogue -- dissemination dichotomy. It is equally adept at allowing one to broadcast to many as it is at enabling two or more people to conduct a conversation. What complicates this ambidexterity of e-mail is that, as Peters points out, in contradistinction to the contemporary tendency to valorise the reciprocity and interaction of dialogue, "dialogue can be tyrannical and dissemination can be just" (34). Consequently, one cannot make easy assumptions about the manner in which e-mail is being used. It is tempting, for example, to conclude from the preponderance of e-mail being used for announcements and simple requests that the supposed benefits of dialogue are not being achieved. This conclusion is demonstrably wrong on two related counts: If e-mail is encouraging widespread dissemination of information which could have been held back (and arguably would have been held back in large organisations lacking e-mail's facilitative qualities), then the workforce will be better informed, and hence more able -- and more inclined! -- to engage in dialogue. The uses to which e-mail is put must not be viewed in isolation from the associated use of other media. If communication per se (including dialogue) is increasing, it may be that e-mail (as dissemination) is making that possible. Indeed, our research showed a considerable unanimity of perception that communication overall has significantly increased since the introduction of e-mail. This is not to necessarily claim that the quality of communication has increased (there is a degree of e-mail communication that is regarded as unwanted). But the fact that a majority of respondents reported increases in use or stability of use across almost all media, including face-to-face interaction, suggests that a more communicative climate may be emerging. We need then to be more precise about the genre of announcements when discussing their organisational implications. Responses in focus group discussions indicate that the use of e-mail for homilies or 'feel good' messages from the CEO (rather than making the effort to talk face-to-face to employees) is not appreciated. Proclamations, too, are better delivered off-line. Similarly, instructions are better formulated as requests (i.e. with a dialogic tone). As I noted earlier, clerical staff, who are more likely to be on the receiving end of instructions, were less inclined to agree that e-mail creates a friendlier environment. Similarly, instructions are better formulated as requests (i.e. with a dialogic tone). As I noted earlier, clerical staff, who are more likely to be on the receiving end of instructions, were less inclined to agree that e-mail creates a friendlier environment. Even more than face-to-face, group interaction by e-mail allows certain voices to be ignored. Where, as often, there are multiple responses to a particular message, subsequent contributors can use selective responses to strongly influence the direction of the discussion. An analysis of a lengthy portion of the corpus reveals that certain key participants -- often effectively in alliance with like-minded members who endorse their interventions -- will regularly turn the dialogue back to a preferred thread by swift and judicious responses. The conversation can move very quickly away from a new perspective not favoured by regular respondents. It is also possible for a participant sufficiently well regarded by a number of other members to leave the discussion for a time (as much as two or three weeks) and on their return resurrect their favoured perspective by retrieving and responding to a relatively old message. It is clear from this forum that individual reputation and status can carry as much weight on line as it can in face-to-face discussion. Conclusion Peters points out that since the late nineteenth century, of which the invention of the words 'telepathy' and 'solipsism' are emblematic, 'communication' "has simultaneously called up the dream of instantaneous access and the nightmare of the labyrinth of solitude" (5). The ambivalence shown towards e-mail by many of its users is clearly the result of the history of responses to communications technology, and of the particular flexibility of e-mail, which makes it an example of this technology par excellence. For the sake of the development of their communicational capabilities, it would be a pity if people continued to jump to the conclusions encouraged by dichotomous conceptions of e-mail (intimate/impersonal, democratic/autocratic, etc.), rather than consciously working to develop a reflexive, open, and case-specific relationship with the technology. Footnotes This does not necessarily exclude oral face-to-face: Peters discusses Jesus's presentation of parables to the crowd as an instance of dissemination. The point is not as transparent as it can now seem. As Peters writes: "It is a mistake to equate technologies with their societal applications. For example, 'broadcasting' (one-way dispersion of programming to an audience that cannot itself broadcast) is not inherent in the technology of radio; it was a complex social accomplishment ... . The lack of dialogue owes less to broadcasting technologies than to interests that profit from constituting audiences as observers rather than participants" (34). That is, post-Fordist developments leading to downsizing of middle management, working in teams, valorisation of flexibility ('flexploitation'). There is no doubt an irony here that escapes the individual employee: namely, every other employee is e-mailing the boss 'because it is convenient for the boss', and meanwhile the boss is gritting his or her teeth as an avalanche of e-mail descends. References Brigham, Martin, and J. Martin Corbett. "E-mail, Power and the Constitution of Organisational Reality." New Technology, Work and Employment 12.1 (1997): 25-36. Casey, Catherine. Work, Self and Society: After Industrialism. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Corbett, Martin. "Wired and Emotional." People Management 3.13 (1997): 26-32. Gee, James Paul. "The New Literacy Studies: From 'Socially Situated' to the Work of the Social." Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context. Eds. David Barton et al. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. 180-96. Frau-Meigs, Divina. "A Cultural Project Based on Multiple Temporary Consensus: Identity and Community in Wired." New Media and Society 2.2 (2000): 227-44. Peters, John Durham. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1999. Sproull, Lee and Sara Kiesler. Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1992. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Derek Wallace. "E-Mail and the Problems of Communication." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.4 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/email.php>. Chicago style: Derek Wallace, "E-Mail and the Problems of Communication," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 4 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/email.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Derek Wallace. (2000) E-mail and the problems of communication. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(4). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/email.php> ([your date of access]).

Usually, a literature search is a benign phase of the research regime. It was, however, during this phase on my current project where a semi-conscious pique I’d been feeling developed into an obvious rancour. Because I’ve been involved in both electronic production and consumption, and the pedagogy surrounding it, I was interested in how the literate domain was coping with the transformations coming out of the new media communications r/evolution. This concern became clearer with the reading and re-reading of Kathleen Tyner’s book, Literacy in a Digital World: Teaching and Learning in the Age of Information. Sometimes, irritation is a camouflage for an emerging and hybridised form of knowledge, so it was necessary to unearth this masquerade of discord that welled-up in the most unexpected of places. Literacy in a Digital World makes all the right noises: it discusses technology; Walter Ong; media literacy; primary, secondary, and tertiary schooling; Plato’s Phaedrus; psychoanalysis; storytelling; networks; aesthetics; even numeracy and multiliteracies, along with a host of other highly appropriate subject matter vis-à-vis its object of analysis. On one reading, it’s a highly illuminating overview. There is, however, a differing interpretation of Literacy in a Digital World, and it’s of a more sombre hue. This other more doleful reading makes Literacy in a Digital World a superior representative of a sometimes largely under-theorised control-complex, and an un.conscious authoritarianism, implicit in the production of any type of knowledge. Of course, in this instance the type of production referenced is literate in orientation. The literate domain, then, is not merely an angel of enlightened debate; under the influence and direction of particular human configurations, literacy has its power struggles with other forms of representation. If the PR machine encourages a more seraphical view of the culture industry, it comes at the expense of the latter’s sometimes-tyrannical underbelly. It is vital, then, to question and investigate these un.conscious forces, specifically in relation to the production of literate forms of culture and the ‘discourse’ it carries on regarding electronic forms of knowledge, a paradigm for which is slowly emerging electracy and a subject I will return to. This assertion is no overstatement. Literacy in a Digital World has concealed within its discourse the assumption that the dominant modes of teaching and learning are literate and will continue to be so. That is, all knowledge is mediated via either typographic or chirographic words on a page, or even on a screen. This is strange given that Tyner admits in the Introduction that “I am an itinerant teacher, reluctant writer, and sometimes media producer” (1, my emphasis). The orientation in Literacy in a Digital World, it seems to me, is a mask for the authoritarianism at the heart of the literate establishment trying to contain and corral the intensifying global flows of electronic information. Ironically, it also seems to be a peculiarly electronic way to present information: that is, the sifting, analysis, and categorisation, along with the representation of phenomena, through the force of one’s un.conscious biases, with the latter making all knowledge production laden with emotional causation. This awkwardness in using the term “literacy” in relation to electronic forms of knowledge surfaces once more in Paul Messaris’s Visual “Literacy”. Again, this is peculiar given that this highly developed and informative text might be a fine introduction to electracy as a possible alternative paradigm to literacy, if only, for instance, it made some mention of sound as a counterpoint to textual and visual symbolisation. The point where Messaris passes over this former contradiction is worth quoting: Strictly speaking, of course, the term “literacy” should be applied only to reading and writing. But it would probably be too pedantic and, in any case, it would surely be futile to resist the increasingly common tendency to apply this term to other kinds of communication skills (mathematical “literacy,” computer “literacy”) as well as to the substantive knowledge that communication rests on (historical, geographic, cultural “literacy”). (2-3) While Messaris might use the term “visual literacy” reluctantly, the assumption that literacy will take over the conceptual reins of electronic communication and remain the pre-eminent form of knowledge production is widespread. This assumption might be happening in the literature on the subject but in the wider population there is a rising electrate sensibility. It is in the work of Gregory Ulmer that electracy is most extensively articulated, and the following brief outline has been heavily influenced by his speculation on the subject. Electracy is a paradigm that requires, in the production and consumption of electronic material, highly developed competencies in both oracy and literacy, and if necessary comes on top of any knowledge of the subject or content of any given work, program, or project. The conceptual frame of electracy is herein tentatively defined as both a well-developed range and depth of communicative competency in oral, literate, and electronic forms, biased from the latter’s point of view. A crucial addition, one sometimes overlooked in earlier communicative forms, is that of the technate, or technacy, a working knowledge of the technological infrastructure underpinning all communication and its in-built ideological assumptions. It is in this context of the various communicative competencies required for electronic production and consumption that the term ‘literacy’ (or for that matter ‘oracy’) is questionable. Furthermore, electracy can spread out to mean the following: it is that domain of knowledge formation whose arrangement, transference, and interpretation rely primarily on electronic networks, systems, codes and apparatuses, for either its production, circulation, or consumption. It could be analogue, in the sense of videotape; digital, in the case of the computer; aurally centred, as in the examples of music, radio or sound-scapes; mathematically configured, in relation to programming code for instance; visually fixated, as in broadcast television; ‘amateur’, as in the home-video or home-studio realm; politically sensitive, in the case of surveillance footage; medically fixated, as in the orbit of tomography; ambiguous, as in the instance of The Sydney Morning Herald made available on the WWW, or of Hollywood blockbusters broadcast on television, or hired/bought in a DVD/video format; this is not to mention Brad Pitt reading a classic novel on audio-tape. Electracy is a strikingly simple, yet highly complex and heterogeneous communicative paradigm. Electracy is also a generic term, one whose very comprehensiveness and dynamic mutability is its defining hallmark, and one in which a whole host of communicative codes and symbolic systems reside. Moreover, almost anyone can comprehend meaning in electronic media because “electric epistemology cannot remain confined to small groups of users, as oral epistemologies have, and cannot remain the property of an educated elite, as literate epistemologies have” (Gozzi and Haynes 224). Furthermore, as Ulmer writes: “To speak of computer literacy or media literacy may be an attempt to remain within the apparatus of alphabetic writing that has organized the Western tradition for nearly the past three millennia” (“Foreword” xii). The catch is that the knowledge forms thus produced through electracy are the abstract epistemological vectors on which the diverse markets of global capitalism thrive. The dynamic nature of these “multimodal” forms of electronic knowledge (Kress, “Visual” 73), then, is increasingly applicable to all of us in the local/global, human/world conglomerate in which any polity is now framed. To continue to emphasise literacy and alphabetic consciousness might then be blinding us to this emerging relationship between electracy and globalisation, possibly even to localisation and regionalisation. It may be possible to trace the dichotomy outlined above between literate and electrate forms of knowledge to larger political/economic and cultural forces. As Saskia Sassen illustrates, sovereignty and territoriality are central aspects in the operation of the still important nation-state, especially in an era of encroaching globalisation. In the past, sovereignty referred to the absolute power of monarchs to control their dominions and is an idea that has been transferred to the nation-state in the long transition to representative democracy. Territoriality refers to the specific physical space that sovereignty is seen as guaranteeing. As Sassen writes, “In the main … rule in the modern world flows from the absolute sovereignty of the state over its national territory” (3). Quite clearly, in the shifting regimes of geo-political power that characterise the global era, sovereign control over territory, and, equally, control over the ideas that might reconfigure our interpretation of concepts such as sovereignty and territoriality, nationalism and literacy, are all in a state of change. Today’s climate of geo-political uncertainty has undoubtedly produced a control complex in relation to these shifting power bases, a condition that arises when psychic, epistemological and political certainties move to a state of unpredictable flux. In Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities another important examination of nationalism there is an emphasis on how literacy was an essential ingredient in its development as a political structure. Operational levels of literacy also came to be a key component in the development of the idea of the autonomous self that arose with democracy and its use as an organising principle in citizenship rituals like voting in some nation-states. Eric Leed puts it this way: “By the sixteenth century, literacy had become one of the definitive signs — along with the possession of property and a permanent residence — of an independent social status” (53). Clearly, any conception of sovereignty and territoriality has to be read, after being written constitutionally, by those people who form the basis of a national polity and over whom these two categories operate. The “fundamental anxiety” over literacy that Kress speaks of (Before Writing 1) is a sub-component of this larger control complex in that a quantum increase in the volume and diversity of electronic communication is contributing to declining levels of literacy in the body politic. In the current moment there is a control complex of almost plague proportions in our selves, our systems of knowledge, and our institutions and polities, because it is undoubtedly a key factor at the epicentre of any turf war. Even my own strident anxieties over the dominance of literacy in debates over electronic communication deserve to be laid out on the analyst’s couch, in part because any manifestation of the control complex in a turf war is aimed squarely at the repression of alternative ways of being and becoming. The endgame: it might be wiser to more closely examine this literacy control complex, possible alternative paradigms of knowledge production and consumption such as electracy, and their broader relationship to patterns of political/economic/cultural organisation and control. Acknowledgements I am indebted to Patrice Braun and Ros Mills, respectively, for editorial advice and technical assistance in the preparation of this essay. Note on reading “The Literacy Control Complex” The dot configuration in ‘un.conscious’ is used deliberately as an electronic marker to implicitly indicate the omni-directional nature of the power surges that dif.fuse the conscious and the unconscious in the field of political action where any turf war is conducted. While this justification is not obvious, I do want to create a sense of intrigue in the reader as to why this dot configuration might be used. One of the many things that fascinates me about electronic communication is its considerable ability for condensation; the sound-bite is one epistemological example of this idea, the dot, as an electronic form of conceptual elision, is another. If you are interested in this field, I highly recommend perusal of the MEZ posts that crop up periodically on a number of media related lists. MEZ’s posts have made me more cognisant of electronic forms of written expression. These experiments in electronic writing deserve to be tested. Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. rev. ed. London and New York: Verso, 1991. Gozzi Jr., Raymond, and W. Lance Haynes. “Electric Media and Electric Epistemology: Empathy at a Distance.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 9.3 (1992): 217-28. Messaris, Paul. Visual “Literacy”: Image, Mind, and Reality. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994. Kress, Gunther. “Visual and Verbal Modes of Representation in Electronically Mediated Communication: The Potentials of New Forms of Text.” Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. Ed. Ilana Snyder. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997. 53-79. ---. Before Writing: Rethinking the Paths to Literacy. London: Routledge, 1997. Leed, Eric. “‘Voice’ and ‘Print’: Master Symbols in the History of Communication.” The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture. Ed. Kathleen Woodward. Madison, Wisconsin: Coda Press, 1980. 41-61. Sassen, Saskia. Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Tyner, Kathleen. Literacy in a Digital World: Teaching and Learning in the Age of Information. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998. Ulmer, Gregory. Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video. New York: Routledge, 1989. ---. Heuretics: The Logic of Invention. New York: Johns Hopkins U P, 1994. ---. “Foreword/Forward (Into Electracy).” Literacy Theory in the Age of the Internet. Ed. Todd Taylor and Irene Ward. New York: Columbia U P, 1998. ix-xiii. ---. Internet Invention: Literacy into Electracy. Boston: Longman, 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Maybury, Terrence. "The Literacy Control Complex" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/05-literacy.php>. APA Style Maybury, T. (2004, Mar17). The Literacy Control Complex. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/05-literacy.php>

Thesis (LLM)--University of Stellenbosch, 2004.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The monitoring of electronic communication is likely to face all employers sooner or later. The rapid advancement in technology aimed at helping to monitor electronic communication, makes it easier than ever before for employers to monitor the electronic communications of their employees. There are important questions to consider when dealing with the topic of monitoring electronic communication. Examples include "mayan employer legally monitor electronic communications?" and "how does monitoring affect the employee's right to privacy?" This thesis is an attempt to answer these and other related questions by analysing, inter alia, South African legislation, the Constitution and case law, as well as comparing the law as it applies in the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The analysis and conclusion offered in this thesis aim to provide theoretical consideration to academics and practical application for employers that are faced with the reality of monitoring electronic communications.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Alle werkgewers sal waarskynlik die een of ander tyd met die monitering van elektroniese kommunikasie gekonfronteer word. Die snelle voortuitgang in tegnologie wat daarop gemik is om te help met die monitering van elektroniese kommunikasie, maak dit vir werkgewers makliker as ooit tevore om sodanige kommunikasies van hulle werknemers te monitor. Daar is egter belangrike vrae wat oorweeg moet word wanneer die onderwerp van monitering van elektroniese kommunikasie ter sprake kom. Voorbeelde hiervan is "mag 'n werknemer regtens elektroniese kommunikasies monitor?" en "hoe raak monitering die werknemer se reg tot privaatheid?" Hierdie tesis is 'n poging om hierdie en ander verwante vrae te beantwoord deur die ontleding van, onder andere, Suid-Afrikaanse wetgewing, die Grondwet en die reg soos deur hofuitsprake ontwikkel, sowel as vergelyking van die reg soos wat dit van toepassing is in die Verenigde Koninkryk en die Verenigde State van Amerika. Die ontleding en gevolgtrekking wat in hierdie tesis aangebied word, is gemik op die verskaffing van teoretiese oorweging aan akademici en praktiese toepassing vir werkgewers wat met die realiteit van die monitering van elektroniese kommunikasies gekonfronteer word.