Our desire for extreme mobility is both enabled by and a motive of the impressive progress in powerful mobile devices like the iPhone, Blackberry and their clones. We can now read our email messages anytime, anywhere, on these tiny marvels. But there is a price – because the small form factor is inherently unsuited to reading many of those messages.

This was pointed out by an attendee at one of my information overload sessions. This guy, a manager at a hi-tech company, was very familiar with the use of handhelds to communicate; and he pointed out that a consequence of the use of these little wonders is that the quality of the interaction has suffered a good deal. This is because when you receive a message of moderate or larger size on a PC, you typically read or scan the entire body text, check out the attachments if needed,  then make an informed reply. On a BlackBerry, by contrast, the tiny screen causes people to read only the top of the message, ignore the attachments, and shoot off a quick reply without having absorbed the full message with all its content and nuances. These messages, he said, are very easy to identify as being from a handheld device – they clearly transmit the fact that the sender hasn’t read the message in any depth before replying.

Of course, there is one case where this is acceptable: when the exchange is of terse one-liners, as in “Can we push the meeting to 5PM?” – “Yes“. In these cases, being able to communicate on the go is very valuable and the medium is well suited to the message. Not so with longer messages, which end up requiring further exchanges for clarification, adding to the overall information overload.

Perhaps we need a separate mailing paradigm for handheld and computer – use the handheld only without attachments and in short bursts of communication, and reserve replies to  longer messages for the PC… but of course, the temptation – some say, addiction – of cleaning out one’s email in real time is too strong to allow such distinctions to catch on… 🙁