Know your network: connecting with audiences in the age of electronic communications

In electronically networked organizations, the capacity to reach more and different audiences virtually explodes. The ability to generate messages quickly brings both benefits and risks: rapid but potentially reactive message exchanges in the context of chaos. In such a context, how can correspondents on the information highway come to know or analyze their audiences? The channel is e-mail; the medium is text. I sit in my office and reach out to touch you. You are my colleague and buddy in another part of the building, the presenter who upstaged me at a recent conference, my technical assistant in academic computing, or a member of a group I have tapped on the ´Net. Composing my message-fingers flying, students at my door-how well do I read you-my audience, my connection to your part of the world? And, correspondingly, do you read me? Do you catch my mood, feel the urgency or the lightness of my request? Can you sense that I am speaking expressly to you?