Toward Parameterisation of E-mail Mediated Communication

E-mail mediated communication rapidly intensifies, both in quantity and quality and so does the need to understand its psycho-social context. In this article we formulated a model of psycho-social elements of the process of receiving an e-mail. The corresponding technique starts by recognising the relevant states of a human receiver and a received e-mail. The states are parameterised, paying special attention to the description of receiver's emotional states, as the event of receiving is more localised in time than that of sending an e-mail. Possible changes are collected into a vertex, a structure expressing the probability that a received e-mail induces the receiver from initial state into a given final state. We conducted a preliminary study that included 87 e-mail messages. 97 attributes were determined for each of the considered e-mails. The analysis shows that acceptance and total receiver's change of state induced by e-mails depend on the combination of several e-mail characteristics. These are interpreted as projections of the sender's states. In this view the e-mail arises as a discrete unit with a finite spectrum of transferable qualities, mediating complex human interaction. Classification-ACM-1998: H5.3 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and Organization Interfaces - Asynchronous interaction