A fellow Cycling ‘74 colleague recently referred to "This commentary on Wiio’s laws":http://www.cs.tut.fi/%7Ejkorpela/wiio.html.

If you ever need to communicate with others, especially on the web, and even more especially on a mailing list, then this is essential reading.

If it seems like hyperbole when the author says that communication is much worse, then consider a couple of things:

• The author makes no mention of the effect of typos in electronic communication. I happen to be notoriously bad about this. A misplaced, misspelled, or missing word can be crucial. And it’s common to have this messed up.
• What about the accidentally hitting the button to send when you meant to hit a different button? Oops.

Those are just a couple that come to mind immediately.