During the years I’ve spent on different web communities and talked endless hours through messenger I’ve begun to analyze the communication itself, which happens through a very dry medium. Normally, as all know, we communicate through so many ways, with our words covering only about 10-30% of the communication itself, depending on what theory we choose. Our movements, our tone, our facial expressions, they all contribute greatly to what we are trying to convey. On the net, that is all lost. Infact, in many cases, even our whole identity is hidden. This has a few interesting effects, though they are not neccessarily good or bad. It really depends on the situation.
One such effect is, that it is much harder to have a complex view of someone, when we have such little information about him / her (if we even know the sex). People get reduced to small ideas and we tend to regard them as more black and white. This is even more enhanced, if, let’s say in a chat a person chooses to use an idea or symbol in his / her nickname. It even happens, if we know the person in real life and have met that person face to face. It’s a curious phenomenon, which I think tracks down to the fact, that we lose so much information when talking with just text. Sometimes this can be a good thing, if we want to focus on a certain idea or topic. In many times, its a hinderance though, and thats why we have created some means to alleviate the pain.
One such mean would be the use of smilies and emoticons. In a simple way, we try to convey feelings through a medium, which at first seems quite resistant to them. And they work very well. The downside of them is, that they arent very subtle. They cover a few of very basic emotions (even though there are alot of them), but they don’t communicate subtle differences. Not only that, they aren’t always interpreted the same way. For example, the smilie : P can be taken to mean that one is dissappointed, frustrated or even that he / she is being rude. But still, smilies are a good way to enrich the textual communication.
There are countercurrents on this aswell. One could think, that since many of the other sources of information are silent, we would put extra effort in words and writing. Alas, it is slow, and slow is not good these days. Acronyms have come common, since writing text is so much slower than talking, and its not happening real time. Probably the most used would be LOL, which is a short for Laughing Out Loud. The problem with acronyms is, that they reduce the information even more, since they are generic statements. They can also be used in different meanings. LOL used to be more of a taunting expression, but then it came to be a generic expression of laughter. One just has to take the context and try to decipher if the user of LOL is using a taunting or a praising tone. Some people, usually older ones are taking quite a negative standing against acronyms, but I would advice against it, since there is a very good reason they have surfaced, and we should learn from it and develop them further.
Most of these are ways to make textual conversation better by making it easier and / or richer. What the future holds in this area, is yet to be seen, but one thing is important: we should definently not swim against the communication currents, but rather understand why they are there, and refine them to a higher level. There are many very important things to be achieved in the world, of which many start with getting people to understand each other better.