Yup, I think e-mail is a perfect way to dispense with the normal restraint one uses when engaged in face-to-face discussions. It's also a horribly inefficient way to actually discuss anything, as opposed to speaking past others, for which it is ideally suited (or, let's say "biased").
I had a short discussion about this (face-to-face) with a few friends of mine at work (we're all programmers who heavily communicate through e-mail). E-mail works very well for broadcasting of statements of activity ("I just finished the e-mail spell-checking program and have released it to our test machines..."), but often extremely poorly for discussion (of algorithms, of software specifications, of programming style, of just about anything). In face-to-face discussion, you have about 1,000 times as many back-and-forth exchanges, in the presence of a gesticulating human, which is a great way to lessen ambiguity for one, and a great way to realize that what you are about to say will actually cause pain to someone sitting right next to you. E-mail can work for this, but it requires self-restraint (i.e., atomized responsibility, a la the market) and careful attention to possible ambiguity in what you and others write.
> .... It's that
>people with nothing to say just can't shut up,
>and everyone is too polite to tell them so.
I don't know where you get this stupid idea.
Bill