Though I never "studied" it in college, I did run a communications research unit for 5 years and have been involved in various aspects of digital media for a lot of years. So I know a little about it. What never ceases to amaze me is the little bombs that get dropped by email, and how they tend to go off. Digital communication is always an inexact science, but still it should be pretty easy to figure out how something might be interpreted (or misinterpreted). For instance, a curt email saying, "so and so said to remove you from these meetings" would tend to give the impression that something was wrong with performance or execution or something. Of course one must always "consider the source" when trying to interpret a digital message, and that is where the fun begins. If one has a fair amount of data on the source, then it is easier to read between the lines. For instance if they are generally rather verbose, a terse message can in fact indicate something is amiss. But as usual, it is critical to realize that often cause and effect can be obliquely related at best.
I love my job...
