Posted by Thomas Sat, 06 May 2006 18:02:49 +0000
More and more these days I find myself regarding email as a less effective form of communcation. I used to reply to emails religously, but now find it difficult to do, if at all, and I’m not really sure as to the cause. Now, I get a ton of email at work, and so everything gets immediately prioritized and filtered. If it’s something that needs immediate attention or something that can wait a day or two, then it will get its own attention in its own time. But, if it’s extraneous or passing information, it gets immediately archived, with most never being looked at again. Of course there is the occation when I search to find some random email that I briefly perused and now need again, but that probably isn’t too much of the population of my email. Perhaps email for me has become an almost purely informational and one-way form of communication, not unlike blogs. That I post and people read, and comments happen, but it’s all pretty much driven by me, and there aren’t very many expectations to deal with. Perhaps it’s because I’ve come to realize what an absolutely horrible form of communication it really is. I’ve seen email threads go on and on for days, when a simple phone call would have fixed the issue in minutes. This is why I have a pretty well formed disdain for email. So consider this a warning, that unless you are asking me a pretty pointed and important question, you might not get a response. So I guess don’t consider it an extra-ordinary brush off, but more like a common-run-of-the-mill type. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that, well, actually I’m not entirely sure why…
And why is it that when I see a picture of a mother holding her newborn child in the hospital, it always looks like it was taken in the 80s? Perhaps the majority of the pics that I have seen up to this point like that were of my parents, having kids in the late 70s/very early 80s. Do I project that timeframe in my mind to those new pictures?
Anyhoo, I just finished watching Primer. Well, technically, I just got done watching it trice (two commentaries). But, the main reason that I am telling you this is because it was written/directed by Shane Carruth. During his director’s commentary, he mentioned his brother Caleb was a recording artist and had done some music for the film. When I heard this, I knew that the director’s last name was Carruth, and it immendiately clicked that his brother was Caleb Carruth. I don’t know if the name is familiar to you, but it is very familiar to me. Before “Shane and Shane” was “Shane and Shane”, it was “Shane and Caleb”. So, I have randomly stumbled upon a movie (I think that Netflix recommended it to me) that was written/directed by the brother of one of the guys in one of my favorite bands, if you can calle them that. Small world. It’s definitely an indie film, and was shown at Sundance, so you know off the bat that it’s not too bad. This was the first film for almost all of these guys and they did pretty well. The story is pretty original and I would recommend watching it. I won’t say it was stellar (and it’s really too bad that they had pretty much zero budget, which really constrained the explaining and telling of the story), but it was pretty darn good for these guys’ first production. So, I would say that it’s definitely worth a Netflix rental, especially if your queue is as empty as mine is.
Kind of ironic that Caleb’s brother would be named Shane as well.
Apparently you are not the only one with such an opinion of email: http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0515/p13s01-stct.html
It’s not so much that non-verbal cues are missed so much that it does not lend itself very well to conversation. One person asks a question, time passes, the other person answers, another question is posed, etc. I guess it is the time that matters most to me. What could have been resolved in a matter of minutes in person or on the phone takes days and much misunderstanding when attempted via email.