[no update due to a trip for the next two weeks]
29 January 2010 (14 Shvat 5770)
I am already convinced that many of those who were born and brought up in Israeli society prefer oral communication, be it face-to-face or by telephone, to written communication, typically by email in our days, for those contexts in which the latter can fulfill the task far more efficiently. I reserve the use of telephone for personal conversations with my closest friends. I find other uses of telephone extremely intrusive. I even find telephone calls from people I know on business matters even more annoying than unsolicited calls from total strangers.
My past experience has shown that more than 99% of business matters can be better handled by email and the use of telephone as an intrusive tool of communication is hardly justified in these cases. So I have been wondering why so many people in Israel seem to prefer telephone and sometimes insist on its use, often causing others to waste their time.
One of the main possible reasons is that traditional Jewish culture, unlike, e.g., traditional Japanese culture, has put more emphasis on oral communication than on written communication. This is also backed by my empirical observation that as a rule my Israeli friends and acquaintances write far less both in quantity and in frequency than their counterparts from Japanese or Russian culture, where writing letters, and long ones at that, as a means of communication has been a well established custom.
Another possible reason is that due to technical difficulties speakers of Hebrew were exposed to the use of email in their mother tongue much later than speakers of other languages. So email has not become an indispensable part of their communication and still remains a kind of substitute for telephone when it is unavailable. And almost none of those who email me in Hebrew seems to know time-honored netiquette of email use.