When e-Communications Go Wrong

The Social Network Show welcomes Dr. Simon Gottschalk to the March 9, 2015 episode.

Have you ever answered an email to later find out that you had misinterpreted it? Have you been embarrassed by a response to an email? Dr. Simon Gottschalk, professor of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas researches how people interact over electronic communication, particularly email. Dr. Gottschalk informs us that the average American worker spends 23% of the workday dealing with emails. Listening to this show you will learn why it is so easy to miscommunicate and misinterpret an email; how ambiguous emails are often negatively interpreted; the mediums of communication that are lost when we email versus communicating face to face; and advise on how should we compensate for the loss of the communication mediums.

Simon Gottschalk is professor of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and Associate at the Paris-based International Research Center on Hypermodern Individuals and Societies. Combining critical symbolic interaction theory and qualitative research methods, his interests revolve around understanding the society-psyche link in phenomena as varied as youth cultures, the mass media, mental disorders, terrorism, and interactions in virtual, urban, and natural spaces. His current research projects include the social psychology of computer-mediated communication, ecopsychology, mobility studies, and sensory social science. His articles, which are on a wide variety of topics, including Terrorism, Mass Media, Virtual Relations, Qualitative Research, Critical Theory, Sensory Sociology, and Hypermodernism, have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Symbolic Interaction, Qualitative Sociology, the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, the Journal of Consumer Culture, Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Space and Culture, Qualitative Inquiry, and others. He also has published book chapters in Inside Social Life: Readings in Social Psychology and Microsociology, Food for Thought, Social Science and Fiction, Drugs and Popular Culture, Pathology and the Postmodern. From 1996 through 2000, he directed the interdisciplinary cultural studies program at UNLV.  After serving as editor of the journal Symbolic Interaction, he was voted president of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in 2011.