Do you understand me?

An interesting piece looking at the difference between email and phone as a means of communication. Both sender and receiver view them equally, but correct communication is far greater by phone.

The reason for this Egocentrism. As the original research study says: "People tend to believe that they can communicate over e-mail more effectively than they actually can. Studies suggest that this overconfidence is born of egocentrism, the inherent difficulty of detaching oneself from one’s own perspective when evaluating the perspective of someone else".

Or, to put it another way, if the other person isn't actually there with you in a 'real' sense, you assume (probably wrongly) that they are thinking what you are thinking.

Makes you wonder how much better we would do if we ditched the virtualising and got back to good, old fashioned face-to-face communication between real people (he says, as someone who communicates a lot by email!)