REDUCING SOCIAL-CONTEXT CUES - ELECTRONIC MAIL IN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION

This paper examines electronic mail in organizational communication. Based on ideas about how social context cues within a communication setting affect information exchange, it argues that electronic mail does not simply speed up the exchange of information but leads to the exchange of new information as well. Consistent with experimental studies, the authors found that decreasing social context cues has substantial deregulating effects on communication. And they also found that much of the information conveyed through electronic mail was information that would not have been conveyed through another medium.