Crystal knows best … or too much? The disconcerting new email advice service
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Version 0 of 1. Do your emailed attempts at sarcasm routinely backfire? Do you never know when to sign off with “x”, or go in with an emoji? Is your judgment of basic etiquette lacking? Then you might be in the target audience for Crystal, a new tool that bills itself as the “best improvement to email since spellcheck”, and is elsewhere described as “somewhere between a horoscope and a Myers-Briggs profile” and “walking the line between innovative and super creepy”. Crystal creates a unique profile for anyone with a LinkedIn account, explaining how to speak, email, work with or sell to them most effectively. With disconcerting specificity, it tells you the “words, phrases, style and tone you should use to reach the recipient in the way that they like to communicate, rather than your own” – even their tolerance for sarcasm and emoticons. It builds this profile from what it can glean about them online: their public Facebook or blog posts, their tweets and the other bits and pieces we all leave like a trail of breadcrumbs behind us as we go about our business on the internet. For a sum, Crystal will even draft emails to people you’ve never met, using a tone and language that their online presence suggests will resonate with them. “Elle is naturally stoic and methodical about decisions, but is willing to take a risk if it is backed up by enough logic,” it tells me about myself, somewhat hesitantly. Despite the 49,300 tweets attached to my name, Crystal’s “accuracy confidence” is just 47%, acknowledging that it found “limited data ... but enough to analyse”. Pressing on, Crystal recommends that someone setting out to email me would be best to do so in “three sentences or less” (...fewer?), and should eschew exaggeration and “sarcastic remarks” in favour of using “data to prove a point”. Its assessment of me is eerily accurate: I am a cyborg, incapable of humour, emotion and empathy, and consequently intolerant of all demonstrations of them by others. I’m a little surprised that it didn’t mention the fact I never blink and am comprised mostly of scrap metal, but I guess that’s what the 53% of wriggle room allows for. In fact, I’d say the 47% accuracy figure is about right. Though I am not quite as robotic as Crystal suggests, I am a fairly to-the-point person and, though I delight in rambling, expressive emails from friends – even those that dip into metaphor – I’d be less enthusiastic to receive one from a stranger. I think twice before giving third parties access to my inbox but, intent on seeing how deep the rabbit hole went, I installed the Crystal Gmail extension. The add-on makes suggestions in real time as you type. I went to compose an email to my friend Craig, an early adopter who made me aware of the service when he tweeted a screenshot of his profile that said empathy “did not come naturally” to him as though it were something to be proud of – a fact that probably tells you more about him than Crystal can. “Be logical,” Crystal urged me before I’d typed a single word. “1 Changes,” it flashed after I’d written just five: “Hi Craig, how’s it going?”. “Craig wants to read a thoughtful, interesting message with casual language that gives him something to be curious about,” it said (Crystal’s emphasis). “Consider leaving out the friendly but unnecessary phrase how’s it going or ask a more specific question.” I’d never felt performance anxiety when it came to writing an email before, but then I’d never been told that I must interest my correspondent “on an intellectual or personal level”. Big Brother has never felt quite so immediate – or judgmental. Related: With How Old Do I Look?, Microsoft is harvesting thousands of faces. Uh, isn't that creepy? | Geordie Guy Crystal revels in algorithms that otherwise tend to simmer under the surface of the internet, where they’re not obvious enough to be troubling. At least How Old Do I Look? – Microsoft’s service that tells you how old you look from a photograph, give or take a couple of decades – masked its data mining as a bit of harmless fun. By comparison, Crystal is upfront, unapologetic, unblinking and probably standing a little too close to you. “What’s the difference between a bad communicator and a good one? Empathy,” reads Crystal’s website, naively or deliberately oblivious to the fact that this is the one thing an algorithm is incapable of. It’s only polite to consider your audience but there’s something deeply disingenuous about emulating their style for your own purposes. When I get an email, especially from someone I don’t know, I want to be able to get a sense of their personality – not of my own, as pieced together from my tweets. I’m not normally one to miss out on an online diversion due to something as mundane as protecting my personal privacy, but seeing my apparent preferences spelled out made me feel deeply uncomfortable. I fear a future in which Crystal has caught on – and I have an inbox full of data-heavy emails of fewer than three sentences. Crystal outsources judgment to algorithms. And if users lacks sufficient nous to know whether or not to use an emoji in a professional email, their correspondents might want to know about it. |