Claremont Friends Meeting statement on Friends and Email

RantWoman's closet full of half-prepared Christmas presents includes this item and permission from a Friend at Claremont Friends Meeting to repost.

 

RantWoman has a tangle of thoughts derived from an email exchange related to this policy. It's on the shelf of half-sewn, not ready for the Christmas tree items and may or may not emerge timely.

 

In the meantime....

FRIENDS AND EMAIL:

Guidelines, Concerns and Reflections

Offered by the Committee on Ministry and Counsel of Claremont Friends Meeting

The rapidly-evolving realms of electronic communication—from email, websites and listserves to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, My Space, Friendster and beyond—pose both great opportunities and challenging issues for Friends. The complexity of these issues is compounded by generational differences: while most older Friends make regular use of email and websites, Quaker youth live in a new universe of additional electronic media. Concern for good Quaker process struggles to keep pace with this unfolding and multifaceted revolution. Most Friends understand that the revolution is irreversible. We need a collaborative effort to address it. For the foreseeable future, youth will be pioneers and teachers of the new technologies; the wisdom of older, seasoned Friends can bring the technologies into harmony with good Quaker practice. These “Guidelines, Concerns and Reflections” are provisional. Like The Elders at Balby, we offer them not “as a rule or form to walk by, but that all with the measure of light which is pure and holy may be guided . . . for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.” (1656)

The following is adapted from the “Milwaukee Friends Meeting Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on E-mail Communications,” by Kay Augustine, Elizabeth Evans, Tom Fritz, and Susan Perkins, June 10, 2010.
On the Positive Aspects of Email:

• Email allows for convenient and rapid exchange of information.
• Sending and reading emails may occur at the convenience of the sender and receiver.
• Emails also provide a written record of communication.
• Attachments to emails allow easy sharing of documents.
• When responding to an email, one may take time and care to compose a reply.
• When emailing multiple parties, a sender can ensure that all receive identical content.
• Email can be enlarged for those with difficulty seeing.
• Joint emails can be a convenient way to arrange meeting times and places, and to circulate agendas, minutes, and informational notes.

On the Negative Aspects of Email:

• Email is a poor medium for corporate discernment. Lines on a computer screen or down-loaded page cannot convey the full range of communication—facial expression, tone of voice, body language, etc. Thus emails can easily be misunderstood.
• Conveying delicate or sensitive information by email is especially challenging.
• The ease of email increases the likelihood that a message intended only for one person or group are inadvertently sent to others.
• Heavy reliance upon email contributes to information overload—and both the writing and the reading of email messages are labor intensive.
• The sender of an email may not be aware that the recipient is out of town (or checks his/her email rarely) and thus may falsely assume that a message has been received.

Please turn over.

Access issues: Those who do not have computers or whose computer skills are minimal may be left out of the loop. Even when recipients are computer literate, emails—and especially attachments—sometimes cannot be opened. Spam blockers often bury email communications in junk mail files, where they may never be read.
Recommendations:

• Whenever possible, corporate discernment should be conducted face-to-face, or when that is not possible, by means of sensitively-managed telephone conference calls.
• Access issues should be handled sensitively—for example, by arranging for an email buddy who agrees to communicate with persons who lack email access.
• Because computers do not always talk to one another, it may be helpful to send attachments in more than one format (for example, in both “pdf” and “.doc” formats). Pasting an attachment into the body of the email message avoids the “I can’t open your attachment” problem.
• When emailing time-sensitive materials, consider following up with a phone call to ensure that the intended recipient has indeed received the message.
• Sensitive email communications should not be forwarded without the author’s consent, and should be carefully stored or archived to preserve privacy.
• Read written communication carefully and take time before responding. Write clearly, reflecting on how one’s words may be read by others.
• Exercise discretion about the use of names, remembering that your message may be read by those for whom it is not intended.
• Remember that in all communications, we are asked to cherish one another. If in doubt, let love be your guide.

Revised and approved in CFM Meeting for Business on 27 January 2013