Its easy when you work in this industry when people talk about ‘communicating’ to automatically start thinking of IP Telephony, routers, Instant Messaging and eMail, but occasionally its worth remembering that ‘communicating’ is actually the way we interact with one another, and the meaning we convey, not the technology we use to do so.
So what started me thinking about this?
I am a heavy user of the Internet, and amongst other things, I participate quite heavily in an online discussion forum. Over the last few years I’ve observed some very interesting interactions between individuals.
Over the last few thousand years we’ve developed our natural language to be highly expressive, with words conveying very different meaning depending upon not ‘what is said’ but ‘how they are spoken’, and added to this body language to convey our true meaning.
And suddenly this isn’t enough.
As more and more of our ‘communicating’ happens electronically, these subtle extensions to the way we communicate no longer work. In response to this, we’ve developed a raft of techniques to cope, from the dreaded ‘smilie’ to a wide range of abbreviations such as IMHO and LOL.
So back to using a forum. Its interesting to have seen many many examples of sarcasm, humour and serious points being taken completely the wrong way because of the lack of expression or non verbal clues. Often this turns an interesting discussion into one that is confrontational, losing its original purpose. Those that also participate in a forum will recognize exactly what I am talking about.
However, for those that haven’t yet succumbed to living online, the same challenges exist. We are all e-mail users, probably most use instant messaging, and virtually all readers will send a fair few text messages. The next generation will have no such challenge. Their range of tools and techniques will have adapted, as they have developed their communications skills with these technologies, not tried to adapt to them. And the richness of the media used will bring back some of the clues for them anyway. It is this that will drive the inexorable progress towards high quality video calling, telephony across the Internet, and of course, a whole new language of IMHO, LOLs and BRBs.
So in the meantime, if you are over 16, be careful what you say. It might not be what is heard!
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