The language of e-mail 127
there any way of knowing who will eventually see it or edit it. The
e-mail guides are thus very emphatic in their advocacy of caution:
‘Don’t write anything to or about another that you would not feel
comfortable saying face-to-face.’^36 ‘Watch what you say’, says an-
other, ‘Big Brother is watching you’ – noting that employers and
law-enforcement agencies may search your mailboxes.^37 The ex-
ploration of the legal implications is in its infancy. Many issues
are known, some extremely serious. There have been complaints
about e-bullying (e.g. in e-mail staff reprimands), sexism, sexual
harassment, the use of libellous language, and rudeness (often aris-
ing out of a misplaced attempt to be funny or ironic). There can
also be ambiguities of an international kind: e-mails which refer to
a local time (or date), without making it clear which time-zone is
involved; e-mails which write the date in one way, forgetting that
the convention is different elsewhere (e.g. 7/3/00 is 7 March in the
UK, 3 July in the USA); e-mails which talk about ‘3 o’clock’ without
making it clear whether morning or afternoon is intended; e-mails
which assume that local abbreviations (e.g.ABC) will be univer-
sally familiar (whereas it means one thing in the USA and another
in Australia); e-mails which assume that a local geographical refer-
ence will be known (e.g.East Coast); and so on. Many e-mail users
are still getting to grips with these matters (see further, chapter 8).
The evolution of e-mail style is in its infancy,^38 and perhaps the
only thing we can say for certain is that it will soon no longer be
as it currently is. Generalizations about the medium have hitherto
been heavily influenced by its technical origins and early years of
use. There is an understandable tendency to think of e-mailing
solely in terms of informality. It feels temporary, indeed, and this
promotes a sense of the carefree. Messages can be easily deleted,
which suggests that their content is basically unimportant. Because
of its spontaneity, speed, privacy, and leisure value, e-mail offers
(^36) Flynn and Flynn (1998: 3).
(^37) Angell and Heslop (1994: 6). In 2000, in the UK, a number of sackings for e-mail
violations brought considerable publicity to the issue of employer powers vs. em-
ployee rights, highlighting the existence of widely different regulations between com-
38 panies and countries.
See further: Thompson and Ahn (1992), Baron (1998a; 1998b; 2000: chs. 8–9).