TOEFL iBT, Independent Writing, Email has made communication between people less personal.

Writing Topic

Consider the following statement. Email has made communication between people less personal. Do you agree with this idea? Support your response by including specific reasons and examples.

☆Let’s Think

Over the past 25 years or so, email has become so popular that the word email is the almost same as the word mail now. Before email came into popular use, mailing meant sending letters or post cards. Obviously, these means of communication are generally more bothersome than email, not to speak of consuming more time and money. It was easier, faster, and cheaper to communicate in person than by mail before.

Now it seems that email has taken place of much part of communication. In business, for example, much of it is conducted through, very often only through, emailing. Personal communication seems to have been affected by this technological change, too. Some think opportunities of personal communication have reduced because of the frequent use of email. Others think that people are enjoying their personal communication more than ever by emailing and text messaging.

☆Essay Structure

♦Sample essay structure in the case that you have two or three reasons to support your argument

【Introduction = Outline】　主張と理由の概略 

【Point 1】理由1の詳細 

【Point 2】理由2の詳細 

【Point 3 / Counterargument-treatment】理由3の詳細または反論の処理

【Conclusion = Wrap-up】結論 

♦Your Sample Essay Structure

【Introduction = Outline】

【Point 1】

【Point 2】

【Point 3 / Counterargument-treatment】

               

【Conclusion = Wrap-up】

☆An Essay for Ideas and Expressions

A villain in an old suspense movie―I think it was Snake Eyes―says, before shooting a person who had tried to personally warn the US President of a danger, "How naïve you were, trying to contact the President by e-mail!” Even deleting the extreme case of hacking as in the case of this movie scene, the impression is that Information Technology has deprived us of the personal area in our communication. However, I cannot totally agree with the statement that email has made communication between people less personal. In some cases, email seems to make personal communication more possible than before. When people talk about communication and the new technology, the discussions seem to be made from mainly three perspectives: openness of the Internet, opportunities for face-to-face communication, and the contents. They lead me to different conclusions. Yet it also seems to come down to the view that whether communication between individuals is personal or not seems to be affected not so much by IT history as by personal history.

The Internet is technically open to everyone. The information on it was meant to be shared by all on the net when it was developed using the public money. Although email is encrypted and, without hacking, its messages stay between individuals, carbon copy (cc) or blind carbon copy (bcc) functions allow the sender to share the message with many people other than the recipient. Also, a moment of lapse can make you unwittingly expose your personal messages to the eyes of countless people. Almost every month, we read about a public figure making a wrong hit and sending a message with an inappropriate expression or picture to everyone on the mailing list before profusely apologizing to the public and/or forced to retire early. If this discussion can include the services related to email function such as message-board discussion or SNS, the inclusiveness will be almost limitless. It is well-known that personnel managers routinely refer to Twitter or Facebook for the information of job candidates and employees. When you really want to be personal, avoid IT.

When it comes to face-to-face communication, the total time we spend on it seems to have reduced owing to the development of email functions. Parents often complain about their children exchanging text messages with their peers even when they are spending time together with their family. More often than before, business is done only through exchanges of emails. It is not uncommon that employees in the same company who have never met or talked with each other have been working together through emailing on a project for years. However, it is also often said that emails help people communicate with their family and friends even when they are away from each other. You can also receive or send personal messages even while you are at work or in class. This was impossible before the service was invented.

In terms of message contents, communication seems to have become more personal than before the advent of email. Since it is more casual than a letter, an email can be written in very roughly or intimate ways. Also, it can be written and sent more readily than a letter. Again, if you include the evolved forms of email like chat rooms or Twitter, no one is excluded in learning someone else's、often a perfect stranger's, personal matter. People upload their personal opinions, personal pictures, and many other kinds of personal information, which are exposed to the eyes of people all over the world. Even in my personal experience, I have encountered many more personal messages of the people I have never met over the past ten years than I had done in the previous decades clearly because of the introduction of emailing services and its derivatives.

Now, this might be a rather personal view, but communication between people may not be influenced very much by changes of means of communication. Personally, I feel that communication is always personal, meaning on the individual level. As far as I know, when I feel that I am really communicating with someone, in other words, having an interaction open-heartedly,  I am interacting with one person whether in person or through some kind of medium. When I interact with more than one person, the interaction becomes not communication but something theatrical or political. I feel that I am playing a role, willingly or unwillingly, wearing a persona prepared by the circumstance I am in. Sometimes, people never hear me whatever I say or only hear me saying what they want to hear from me. Also, people act or talk differently when they are alone with me from when they are in a group, and it is in the former that they seem to be really frank and honest. I guess most people have the same kind of experience more or less. 

This impression may not be too personal or unfounded. One professor who studies phenomena happening on the Internet says, after an overview of an experiment in which students are assigned to talk in front of the webcam in their bedrooms and send the video message to YouTube every day, that, although people are showing their very personal sides and talk about personal matters in the virtual world, they are kind of playing a role, wearing a face which is very intimate but still made up to be shown to the public. If this applies to all the personal messages and posts on the web, strictly speaking, they are not really personal. Humans are social animals, and thus must be keenly aware, consciously or unconsciously, of the social side of the Internet. Furthermore, no one, including the sender of a message, can actually tell whether the person is really making a confession or not, since our minds are very complex. Therefore, the contents that seem to be personal might not be really personal.

It is difficult for me to conclude with certainty that email has made communication between people less personal because it is difficult to discern what is really going on in today’s communication. People interact in many ways and email is only a means of communication, which might not be so powerful as to make fundamental changes in our communication, while we all feel things are not really the same as before email was created. In any case, I would never try to contact the US President via email if I had to personally warn him.