Re:Non verbal communication in chat

<misunderstandings that can occur when someone doesn't type in a smiley face when joking around>

I'm very skeptical that this is an accurate causal explanation, except in trivial dialogs. I think that in most cases when an emoticon minimizes confrontation, it is not because is clarifies the affect of the sender (since it generally doesn't, due to lack of specificity of emotion, use of deception, and so on). Rather because it offers a metamessage specifically that the sender is trying to minimize conflict, that their intention is not to confront.

In messages of more than a brief phrase, literate people speaking the same language can convey much more affect with words than with an emoticon, which symbolizes a wealth of subjective experience and motivation into one of a tiny number of categories, quite unlike the richness of nonverbal face to face communication signals.

Possibly we do notice certain cases where someone "didn't know the other person was joking," but exaggerate the amount of nonverbal cognition transmitted in the emoticon.

The equivalent of body language in written prose is not the emoticon but the tone, word choice, rhythm, spelling, etc., of the sender. You don't find emoticons needed to "avoid misunderstanding" until the Internet, even though there was a lot of writing going on long before then.

The difference is partly (in the case of "chat") that we rely on tiny phrases back and forth that generally convey almost no information, except raw intention ("any ladies here want to ... ?). And maybe partly that growing numbers of people are becoming progressively less literate as they rely more and more on those smaller and smaller bursts of simpler information. With diminishing literacy, we become less able to construct and interpret the subtleties of affect and intention in written words, paradoxically while relying more and more on written words for communication.

Replies:

Re:Non verbal communication in chat, by Jillian Afton, 10/07/00 Re:Non verbal communication in chat, by same person as before, 10/09/00 Re:Non verbal communication in chat, by Jillian Afton, 10/10/00 Re:Non verbal communication in chat, by , 10/10/00 Re:Non verbal communication in chat, by Jillian Afton, 10/11/00 Re:Non verbal communication in chat, by Jillian Afton, 10/11/00 Re:Non verbal communication in chat, by Todd I. Stark (toddstark@aol.com), 10/11/00 Re:Non verbal communication in chat, by J Afton, 10/12/00 Re:Non verbal communication in chat, by Todd I. Stark (toddstark@aol.com), 10/13/00 Re:Non verbal communication in chat, by Jillian Afton, 10/12/00 Re:Non verbal communication in chat, by J Afton, 10/14/00 Re:Non verbal communication in chat, by neeru, 10/14/00 Re:Non verbal communication in chat, by J Afton, 10/14/00

| Behavior OnLine Home Page | Disclaimer |

Copyright © 1996-2004 Behavior OnLine, Inc. All rights reserved.