Tern Of The Century




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One day my friend Ash was being encouraging (as she often is), and she sent me an email that just said:  

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And I wrote back:



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I started to think that you could create a whole philosophy of selfimprovement around shoe company slogans:

 
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So I began collecting company slogans with an eye toward their self-help appeal. I was surprised how many of them embraced great-minded sentiments. They're not afraid of associating a grandiose statement with a marginal product or company. Besides being memorable, slogans also try to create an emotional bond with the customer, and I guess this means cultivating a need, an inspiration or a tone of importance. For example, it's not as if Lowes Home Improvement thinks "Let's Build Something Together" is just about tile floors, plastic siding, doorknobs or even customer service. Their slogan appeals to the rhetoric of unity and cooperation, while also identifying their business (building) and using a sentence construction that's memorable and familiar from other common phrases; in this case I think of "The family that plays together, stays together," or “Do Something!” or “Let’s do something,” or “Somebody do something!” It sounds rah-rah and active. At lot of times I look around and wonder how we can allow ourselves to get run ragged by consumerism. We employ so much personal energy in new purchases and consumer choices. I think that besides always searching for means to discriminate ourselves from others and add to our value, another reason consumer choices become personally important is that brands and products, whether they deserve it or not, really do wrap themselves up in images and language of more meaningful goals and desires. While vacuous greed for status and value may lead in large part to someone’s product fluency, brands and marketing also talk to us in concepts that we need to think about in order to create some kind of identity for ourselves and structure for our experiences. Corporate slogans are demonstrations of deep, earnest sentiments and needs layered with a simple descriptions of objects, companies or services. Their broad meanings and short length make them especially susceptible to be turned into pocket-ready advice. On these next two pages are my takes on the raw marketing meeting of some slogans, as well as my interpretations to guide anyone looking to derive personal reflection or guidance.

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Not long ago my former colleague, Evelyn, asked me how my new job was going. I wrote:

I'm not sure if she was asking or if she was laughing at me. If she was laughing at me, she has a point. How can you mess up email? Nobody runs email - nobody's in charge of it. It's disposable, informal, chatty. It's like complaining that people are walking wrong. People do not walk wrong. There’s little grounds to be up in arms over the way other people walk.

people here don't know how to use email! They mess it up completely, you have no idea. :) She wrote back: BTW - how can you mess up email ha ha

So no matter what anyone tells you, there are no social or politeness rules for email. Most organizations and companies don't distribute any guidelines for email. If they do, it's just the irritating and lengthy legalese automatically appended to every outgoing message, to declare that its contents are proprietary. The real limitations on email come out of its systematic structure, its programs and our access to it. I'm continually amazed by the strange situations happen because of how we use email, but I haven't run across that many other people who have much interest in email a social system. So I figured since it wasn't a completely tired topic I might attempt to examine, from my admittedly narrow viewpoint, a few of the typical communication snafus that email can perpetuate. I think email systems set us up for particular kinds of misunderstanding and miscommunication. At work I’ve watched groups pellet each other with email for the past few years and I've seen the same kind of email missteps happen so many times that it really does start to feel like a trap; a set-up to deliberately exclude people, to pester them, to ignore them, to annoy them, to control them, to expose them, to make the look foolish. Some of this might sound obvious, but I think it’s illuminating just to step back and describe fragments of what’s going on. For many people with office jobs, work equals email, or nearly. Here, I’ll be considering workplace email, not social email, because that’s where I’ve seen the more complex ramifications of email use play out. The narrow band of miscommunication and misunderstanding that I’ll try to focus on are the squirrely situations that happen because of the little CC (Carbon Copy) field on email messages. This small bar of space can balloon to incorporate many recipients, from a few co-workers in a four-square cubicle to entire companies. It can also be filled with group email addresses, each of which is a consolidation of a larger group of recipients, a bundle of many names, so that only one address has to be entered and the TO






The Copy Cats ask, How can email be more in sync with in person communication?

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or CC fields are virtually filled to the brim. These group email addresses can represent departments, divisions, employees of certain buildings, employees of certain states, who work with certain products, who are at the same professional level, etc.. The sender to recipient iterations potential in just one CC field of one email (this same situation can apply to the “To” field used in a similar way) can be imagined as a gathering of a large group of people on a real, grassy field. Imagine all the possible public and private conversations that could develop from the group standing on a field, the sender and all the recipients. Two people could whisper so no one else would notice or hear. Some might be stare off into the sky, not paying attention to what others are saying. Some might sleep. Several groups could start talking at the same time. Topics could change. The analogy of a group email as a real field doesn’t cut it in a lot of ways. One way is that it doesn't incorporate the fact that on email no one has an appearance, they just have an address, so unless everyone already knows everyone out there in the bodily world, you don't always know who is who. It also doesn’t take into account the way timing can play a part in a how a Blackberry Blindness discussion unfolds over email. There’s no easy analogy to the The person emailing from a blackberry or reading different reading patterns you see on email. Some people PDA often can't see previous relevant feel every message as a massaging vibration on their hip, some message content or reference past messages check their email every day, or (for heaven’s sake) every week. Still, I think imagining an actual field when you think about a group while they're composing their response. Panicked blackberry users tend to wail out email can help to show the creative and unpredictable ways people into the darkness. With their thumbs, they use email. reply with commands, strings of questions Fortunately and unfortunately, group emails are very that have already been answered, apologies convenient for continuing and elaborating on conversations, both and unintelligible exclamations. on and off the topic of the originating email. Of course, in order for Steven to email Jack, he doesn’t need to wait for Leanna to email Steven, Jack and Tim, and then start responding just to Jack based on that first email. Steven could just start a new message and email Jack about what he wanted to say. But I think one of the reasons that people tend to use the leftovers of a group email to talk about something else is because groups emails remind people who is available to speak with and they also get around any hesitancy that comes with starting a new message, like the anxiety over the subject or the formality of creating a new message. I know that might sound antiquated – email is the cool whip of communication, so casual and lite-weight. People talk about ‘firing off’ emails and spamming their friends, but I think that even though we know email is free and limitless, we still associate value and degrees of formality to brand new messages, even if unconsciously. It’s easier and less formal to reply to someone else’s message than it is to start your own. Using a group email message to reply on a separate topic or to a subset of the recipients can be like writing your novel in the margins of a library book and hoping your readers will hear what you have to say. Staring into a full inbox, where they see mainly the sender and subject line information, recipients can’t tell that the unopened message is actually about something else. People can miss those emails if they’re ignoring the original email chain or they can accidentally respond to an earlier version of the email and unintentionally include people they didn’t mean to include. I think we have an easier time accepting that there is great variety in the way people talk, react and behave as physical people, say, in a conference room, behind a counter or on the sidewalk, than we do in conceiving that level of variety over email. I think it’s often difficult for individuals and organizations to anticipate, tolerate, or even properly understand this range of behavior and its meaning. Just like in person, over email, people don't talk on subject and they don't talk to the right people all the time. They pick and choose who they talk to. They’re clumsy about how they respond. They’re not always mirroring the formality or informality of others in the group. They can be very specific and picky about how they communicate. Tern of the Century

Maybe out on the grass field most of the people already know each other very well. A few newcomers, a few strangers end up there too. The new people don't know the others and maybe they don't know why they're on the field at all. What would happen if these new people start yelling, or telling jokes, or jabbing other people. Maybe the new people start asking a lot of questions to an otherwise silent group. An outsider can be a person from another company, a client, someone from another department, basically anyone who's not included in the regular flow of email. Many times I’ve seen how insiders and outsiders clash over how quickly the other should respond to messages, who they should be sent to, the tone that should be used. When an outsider is copied (cc’d) into a message, they have no way of knowing the internal email rules, or, they simply follow rules of their own organizations which might be annoying or inscrutable to the rest. While one organization might demand than every email have a specific and relevant subject line, other organizations follow no standards for subject lines. Some companies frown upon starting new email threads on topics with already existing threads, others pay it no mind. Other internal rules include NTN (“No Thanks Needed,” not sending messages that only contain "Thank You!" information), the importance of responding immediately to certain people, not picking and choosing recipients (dropping and adding names), always copying a certain person, even presumptions to read or not read certain messages, and rules about calling people in lieu of conveying the information over email. When you see an outsider baffled by the logic of a particular groups’ emails, or who’s responses are either jarringly inappropriate or misdirected, it shows the great variety of patterns of use, and the private ad-hoc patterns that companies develop to manage their email. Emailers take for granted that outsiders will just know the etiquette of, for example, not resolving something on the phone without updating others over email, or copying in somebody’s boss into an email chain. These differences can create aggravation and resentment and serious problems with the work. Those involved blame each other, but they don't usually think about how email has been a factor in their conflicts or delays. Many common misunderstandings poke up because of unspoken rules about who to include as a group email changes and is continued. One of the built-in characteristics of copying (cc'ing) is that it's a voluntary choice that must be selected down the timeline of the email. It's like a switch that needs to be switched on all the way down the email chain. Imagine being a train conductor and every time you reach for the microphone to make an announcement you have to press the “All Cars” button or else only the first car will hear you. Each time you forget to do it, you’re only talking to the first car. Every person who chooses to respond to the email makes a deliberate choice, depending on their email program, to either Reply All Tern of the Century

(including everyone) or just to Reply (responding only to the sender). Most email programs default to Reply, not Reply All. So why does this matter? Well, back to the clumsy analogy of the grass field: The group of people are standing now in a circle facing each other, this is one way to clarify the visualization of the people in a group email. Clara says something so everybody can hear. Trevor says something back, and everybody hears. Standing in a close circle means that when anybody speaks, everybody at least notices that the speaker has spoken, even if they don't hear every word. The circle in the field could be a table that people are sitting around, or a cluster of people standing close together, any physical situation in which most people can detect when someone in the group speaks. Over email however, unlike in the human circle on the field, it's just as easy for Trevor to speak exclusively to Clara, only to her, as it is for him to speak to the whole group. All he has to do is reply just to her, instead of to everyone on the email. Out in the real field, it would be hard for Trevor to say something to Clara Sorry Everyone without other people noticing. In addition, over email, Access to big lists of email addresses can make not only does no one else in the group realize he even mistakes much bigger. A couple years ago I got an opened his mouth, even Trevor might not realize he just email from an employee I’d never heard of. I opened spoke only to Clara. I think that most people who've used it and it was a racist joke. The sender was a relatively group email a great deal will recognize the very common senior employee and hundreds of other employees and situation of a person on a group email who replies only to I received his joke because he accidentally CC'd a huge the sender, when it would have made more sense to reply email list, which included anyone who works with a to everyone. In this way, it’s easy to initiate multiple concurrent conversations about the same topic, originating certain database at the company. To the sender, that address is the same size as a single email address, a from the same line of dialogue, all completely oblivious to single line in the “To” field, but represents hundreds each other. Even if they choose just to reply to the sender, of people. Oops. It took him only a few moments to when they do so it’s often very difficult for them to realize and respond with an aghast email, and the rest anticipate how other members of a CC'd group will either of the day to craft a longer apology. need to know all the related information or be helpful in resolving a question down the line. Within five minutes of sending an email to a group, ten different people can all respond, independently, privately, all with key information that others are asking for, but if they don’t reply all, you're just left with the sender holding ten flimsy threads and trying to figure out how to turn these private messages into public information. At a previous job, we were explicitly told and reminded to Reply All to most messages with multiple recipients because it was obvious that when this didn't happen, there was crying in the bathroom, abuse toward the copy machine, usually quiet phones ringing. The more we use email, the more it seems unnatural not to try to find ways to make it work better. I think there’s a lot of complacency around email use and the way email programs work. In part it comes from organizations’ failure to take email seriously and to formally recognize its complexities and unique mismatches with human behavior. Most organizations accept email as a natural fit, just the next communication tool down the line. They think of it as the evolved memo, the online meeting, speech recorded, an automated pinging system, a file transfer system, a network of their employees communicating in a virtual space that can be saved, tracked and accessed at anytime and from anywhere. Email is all those things (and much more!), but its format and flow sometimes seems to me as arbitrary and filled with pitfalls as communication based exclusively on sky-writing. I remember how one day my supervisor, who spent fifty hours a week on email, and who’d return from vacation to thousands of real emails, not spam, looked at my color-coded inbox and said, “Oh look at that, you’ve got different colors for different people.” Her workdays consisted of relentless torrents of email, but it was still hard to imagine changing it in any way.

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They were kidnapped during a party at the Japanese embassy. It was kind of a waste of time, both my obsession and as it turned out, the kidnapping. It went on for way too long, way past its usefulness. I knew nothing about the politics of Peru and I didn't know anything at all about Lima. I clipped the articles and read all the details of how the kidnappers were getting along. I looked at maps and diagrams of the building they were in that were printed in the local paper. The kidnapping took place on December 17th, and the seventy-one remaining captives were not released until April. I wanted to know about their basic survival and how they were spending their time. There were stories from people who were let go about how they entertained themselves, what they ate. I liked to think about how the kidnappers were trapped by the situation, that it was becoming more than they could manage. That was the main take-away I got from the whole thing. It was news, but it might as well have been fiction for the amount of relevance it had to my daily life. It was all entirely beside the point. It really had nothing to do with me and I was so far from understanding the politics or ramifications that I might as well have been following the changing weather patterns over a Peruvian Japanese embassy-sized patch of the Pacific ocean. Why do certain news stories capture our attention? We use news stories to think in ways that fall well outside of their importance as pieces of news information. We use news for more than news, more than journalism, reporting, getting information to make good choices, being in touch with the wider world, or being current. I think it's almost impossible for personalized re-working of news not to happen. In other words, it’s hard for people to reasonably put it in context. The daily news is far flung, it's world news. Daily news, hourly news, ticker news is all world news. And that's World News. Politics in Asia, politics in Zimbabwe, science in Denmark, science in Brazil. It has so little to do with the individual. We all know this and it's often the groundwork for how we talk about news. We say it doesn't seem real, it’s surreal, we don't take it heart, it's boring, clinical. We complain that we're not reacting properly to tragedy, or that tragedy isn't being covered in a way that's sensitive enough. There’s a creativity in how people find stories that speak to their weaknesses, desires and personal interests and go to craft illogical connections between themselves and the news. We feel misguided empathy. We appropriate facts for use later. Sometimes that only meaning is just that we persist, beyond reason, in giving a news thread our attention, despite the fact that it's narrowly focused, far far away or irrelevant to our lives. Here are some people who shared with me the news stories they took note of.

In the Valley News, it was reported that a Hanover couple was suing the Dresden School District for subjecting their 3 children to the Pledge of Allegiance, a violation of their right to be atheists. MAUREEN Tern of the Century

From Yahoo! News Nov. 28: "The frozen landscape of Antarctica can be seen in more detail than ever before. Scientists have stitched together more than a thousand satellite images to make a new, true-color map of the southernmost continent, unveiled by NASA today. …The map, dubbed the Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica, is a realistic, nearly cloudless view of the southernmost continent with a resolution 10 times greater than in previous images." SARAH

"Public television stations have been broadcasting a new release of a wonderful 20-year-old documentary, "Starring Natalie Wood," narrated by George Segal and skillfully directed by Susan F. Walker. What mesmerizing archival footage of a screen personality who seemed to burst with the life force and whose 1981 drowning in the idyllic Santa Catalina harbor still seems unreal." ASH Tern of the Century

On NPR: "But Musharraf's decisions to declare a state of emergency, suspend Pakistan's constitution, not to mention putting Bhutto under house arrest, have thrown the Bush administration's plans into some disarray. Bhutto's decision to turn away from Musharraf's camp haven't made things easier for Washington, says Daniel Markey, a South Asia expert at the State Department from 2003 until just recently. "This really throws a wrench into that works. I can't imagine how it can be unraveled very easily. It would take a great deal on both sides, to concede a lot, to get back to the negotiating table." A.J.

A while ago I heard a report on NPR about Filipino immigration. It was the story about how families get split up and featured the story of one family that was forced to leave a son behind. It was years before the son (who was in his late teens or early twenties at the time) got to join the rest of his family. I think it took 9 years. By that time, the son was a father himself with two children that he'd left behind. I don't think he was legally married to his wife either, because I know being married makes it almost impossible to immigrate. I think that family is now waiting for the son's "wife" and children to get visas. MADELINE Tern of the Century

For quite a long period of time I tuned in at ll p.m. to Aaron Brown. I liked his style. Anyway sometimes it would be hard to unwind if he had a sad or disturbing story, which I could manage to make things much worse in my mind. No doubt even putting myself in the so called situation, and therefore not being able to get to sleep. Finally I quit watching the late news reports, because I was wasting too much energy thinking about things that I have no control over, and not getting my sleep. I have read the newspapers since I was in the fourth grade and of course at that time I did not read everything. I do read the editorials and opinion articles. The human interest stories can be inspiring. But there is a lot of "fill" in the papers just as on the t-v news. CNN gets tiresome rolling the same films hour after hour. Larry King is almost always just junk. VIVIAN

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Going down below the bridge, it started to look less like a highway and more like a monument to the width of the Hudson River. I was on my second trip to the Palisades. I had just moved back to New York City, started a new job. The Palisades sound like an amusement park, but they're actually section of forest and cliffs along the Hudson River, in New Jersey, facing the northern-most part of the island of Manhattan. You take a walkway from Manhattan over the George Washington Bridge, then cross over onto a path that leads along the cliffs or along the shore of the river. At the time I thought again, disappointed, how I never knew about the Palisades while I was living just seven blocks away from the bridge on 171st street a few years before. During that time I know I tried to complete some absurd adventure, like running from 171st street down to Central Park by way of the west side, but all that time I couldn't manage to walk seven blocks north, onto the George Washington Bridge, just beyond Papaya Dog Restaurant. But to be honest, it would have been hard to stumble upon this route; it's not easy to find the walkway; it's not visible to the naked eye between the concrete on-ramps and off-ramps surrounding the bridge. I only found out about it from reading about trails online. Tern of the Century

So now that I live two boroughs away, and have to ride almost the entire length of the A train line, from Brooklyn to 175th street in Manhattan, I finally want to go to the Palisades. It’s a long ride, so I brought along a throw-away read - my unsustainable practice of bringing an article or newspaper that I can either throw away or leave out for somebody else when I get to my destination. This time, the throw-away read was a book. A whole book. I found it on the "Free Books" cart at the library on 23rd street. It’s Don't Sweat the Small Stuff For Teens (The inside page is stamped, EPIPHANY, for the 23rd Street Branch library). Don't Sweat the Small Stuff for Teens is just right for a time like this, where I don't exactly want to lug a book up and down the Hudson River shoreline, but I do need something to read on the way there. But on the train, I started to really enjoy the one hundred mini chapters. Somebody like me, susceptible to inspirement chatter and the redundant simplistic pysch-up mantras that fuel selfhatred magazines, like "Self" and "Teen Vogue" and Oprah, is very taken in with a book like this. It says a lot about me that this was also the "teenage" edition of this work. Chapter titles included “Trusting Inner Signals,” “Daring to Show Enthusiasm” and so on. I couldn’t throw it away when I arrived at 175th street. It's a small, soft cover book so I ran with it across the GW Bridge, which added to my wind resistance against the winds pushing west to east. It's a strange shaped book actually, it's shape and size say "gift book." It's good for a really well weak-legged coffee table. When I finally reached the trail and the greenery of the Palisades, I decided to hide Don't Sweat The Small Stuff For Teens * * * Simple Ways to Keep Your Cool In Stressful Times so the I could get it back later. I put it under some leaves near a log just off the path. The run was very good, and although I was sweating, it was not that kind of sweating. I managed to find the trail that runs right along the river (Special reader hint: Photo on page is actually of me on one of these paths). The views up and down the river are wide and make the city look fortified, with the giant pillars of bridges rising up, and lit up at night, and the skyscrapers peering out from behind each other. The city is so loud that even from that distance you could hear it whirring on every pitch of the acoustic range, especially the noise from the bridge, a double layer of traffic, one hidden under the top. Up on the ridge, I passed by a couple and their young son and the father asked me if you could get down to the water and I said it was just a little further. Much later, down on the shoreline trail, it was nearly dark I passed them again, they were headed further from the bridge and I was going back. Maybe it was the sound of the soft waves breaking or because I wasn't sweating the small stuff but I didn't feel afraid for them going off into the darkness like that, they seemed unafraid. Across the river in the dark I saw a silver Amtrak train come out of the trees and then disappear into a tunnel. I managed to get back up to the ridge, with a little help on the stones steps from my xenon headlight, and then of course I had to look for Don't Sweat the Small Stuff For Teens. I couldn't find it, even with the light. I was starting to wonder if Don't Sweat The Small Stuff For Teens may have been snatched by a soul-searcher or a wayward bandicoot. I hadn't seen very many people so it seemed unlikely. As I poked around like somebody who's looking for lost keys in the dark, I thought of the implications of sweating or not sweating over losing Don't Sweat. What would Richard Carlson say? How could I not sweat losing the book that was supposed to tell me how not to sweat it? This was a problem. I thought about Chapter 78:Cut Your Losses, but then I realized I was looking on the wrong trail (Ch. 23:See Your Choices as Forks in the Road). In the dark I reminded myself to take my time, take a deep breath (Ch. 55: Remind Yourself that No One Is Out to Get You). Calmer, I found the right trail (Ch. 56:Go the Extra Mile) and there was the book, saying hello, looking out under the leaves. So it came back with me over the bridge, and read it on the way back from Washington Heights to the Brooklyn Heights. (Ch. 26: Put it on Paper)

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