27 Jun Why the CC Button is the Devil in Email Form
Posted at 09:29h
in
Psychology
by Paul Sutton
There’s one thing I absolutely love about social media: you can’t CC people. Tweet someone, or even two or three people, and you’re communicating direct with them because it’s relevant to that person/those people. Send someone a Facebook message and you’re in the land of one-to-one contact. Unlike email, what there is not in social media is a culture of copying in people ‘because they might need to know’. It’s something I have grown to despise.
I recently took a week’s holiday. On my return I had in excess of 750 emails in five days. And you know how many of those were actually properly relevant to me? Eight. Out of nearly 800 messages, there were only eight that I needed to respond to or act on. The rest I deleted immediately.
CCing is nothing more than acceptable spam.
All the CC option does is to fill email inboxes with inordinate amounts of irrelevant junk that wastes time and slows email servers down. Much of it is predictable and trite, and contains information that isn’t even helpful to the recipient. People use it largely to cover their asses, to avoid taking full responsibility or to inform others of personal achievements that those ‘others’ don’t care about. It’s lazy, its pusillanimous (new word that I shall be using more often) and its borne of a culture of fear. And yet we tolerate it and, in some cases, encourage and facilitate it because it’s ‘standard practice’. Well personally I’d love to see us all rethinking our use and motivations for using the CC option and heavily limiting it – do I really need to know what you’re emailing someone else about? One thing I do know is that Twitter wouldn’t stand for it. But maybe that’s a different mindset?
Like This Post? Subscribe to TheSocialWeb
