I've been thinking a lot about different mediums of communication. It's taken me a long time to learn not to flame people when they send me a crappy/stupid/insipid/mean/antogonistic email, but instead to take a deep breath ... and call them on the phone. This idea has led me to use a model of tiered communcations. Face to face is tier 1. It's the purest most reliable (though not perfect) medium of communication. Then there's video/tele conferencing (tier 2) which has many of the face to face elements like real time feedback but only include a small part of the sensory spectrum. Then you get into delayed mediums like IM/email/letters which are coarse and prone to misinterpretation (tier 3). Many people would contend that video conferencing is the same as face to face, but that's not true. In a video conference you can't smell, you can't feel air currents from exasperated arms waiving, and there's no risk of somebody punching you in the nose. So given any scenario I try to decide which of those 3 tiers is the most appropriate for the communication. I try to reserve tier three communciations to simple statements of fact that are hard to misinterpret. I know it's a little over thought, but I've worked hard in the last few years to develop these "ephemeral" aspects of professionalism. I'm sure this has probably been developed, researched and PhD'ed. But I drummed this up on my own.