Email - Message Transmission and Social Ritual

Abstract

In considering the implications of what it means to be moving towards an Interaction Society, my research into intraorganisational email illuminates some of the inherent social complexity and the subtle nuances of its use within organisational life. A range of significant insights emerged through a deep hermeneutic understanding of the ways that people within the study were constructing email as an everyday part of their workplace. As a consequence, I have constructed a new concept, message web to encapsulate the social interaction and human sense-making activities around email in association with its technical capabilities as daily life is being played out within organisational cultures today. In this chapter, I tell an ethnographic story concerning just one strand of the case study organisation’s message web: the copying function of email. And being an ethnographic story, I’ve also embedded reflective glimpses of my research processes.