Forums → The Tavern → Communication
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To spike up the poor selection of topics there seem to be in the Tavern, we have this.
Web communication.
A skill everyone needs in this world of ours, but so few seem to master. As tone of voice, body language and facial expressions translates rather poorly to text, we are left with a few simply clues in our daily communication with others.
So, my question is:
How do you cope with this in your daily digital communication with others, and how would you suggest the technology evolves to counter for the lack of human exposure in the communication on the web?
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How do you cope with this in your daily digital communication with others, and how would you suggest the technology evolves to counter for the lack of human exposure in the communication on the web
Things that help with this are those emotes and capitalizing letters along with bold and italics. Slang such as lol and rofl and wtf also help to set a tone. Eventually I imagine that video chat will become the norm for online talks.
I use caps, vocabulary and full words to convey my thoroughness. I also use a fair bit of humour, and a lot of what I call sinisteria.
and how would you suggest the technology evolves to counter for the lack of human exposure in the communication on the web?
Perhaps something where you type (or copy/paste) the words into a voice simulator like this and select the indicated voice to convey your tone.
How do you cope with this in your daily digital communication with others
I try not to use expressions that could be interperated differently such as sarcasm
how would you suggest the technology evolves to counter for the lack of human exposure in the communication on the web?
I suposse thhere is no real to do that unless you redesign the strucural integrity of the entire internet/comeputer basicly turning everything into a Skype or maybe theres a better way and im just not smart enough to figure it out
How do you cope with this in your daily digital communication with others, and how would you suggest the technology evolves to counter for the lack of human exposure in the communication on the web?
Well I try to understand what he/she/it is talking about from earlier comments on anything. If I know the person/thing then I use to that understand what they might say towards that particular topic or comment. Now a way for this to to be stopped... A very good question indeed, but with few answers that would work for everything. Maybe color changing text that would allow for different emotions to be shown? If not that emoticons aren't a horrible idea but they're not a very good one either.
Even with these functions in mind, a lot of research has indicated that humans are quite bad at communicating without body language and tone (considering it is rather important in our ability to convey emotions and such), and that we might be filling in emotions when we cannot actually see the other person.
This means that a neutral or even happy sender might come off as angry, sarcastic or otherwise negative to an already negative receiver.
Much like emoticons sometimes gets abused by the sender to come off as less offensive than intended.
Caps, italics, bold and colour of text might very well work, but only within a certain group of people that talk regularly, as they are all familiar with the same definitions behind these functions.
Others might be able to read it properly as well, but would have to rely on basic definition and former communication rather than simply reading it fluently.
As an example, some users might find that all caps is simply a way to get attention from the rest of the community, while others would consider it offensive, as they read it as yelling, while others might just ignore it all together, giving it the opposite reaction of initially intended.
Of course Skype and other such services might be able to counter all this entirely (depending on your webcam quality), but think of how the forums would be if e all had to have a conversation through Skype to discuss.
Obviously textual communication is here to stay, and we have to be able to deal with the consequences it might cause.
For expressing some emotions you may use smiles, use letters along with bold and italics or caps.
That can easily work with people that you know, but with other people it's not so simple (here can happen the situation which Cenere described).
Using video-conferences or just voice-conferences that can collect several forum's users won't work (all the people have a habbit as talking while another one is speaking), also connection to the internet have great value when sending/recieving media-trafic.
About misunderstanding and sarcasm...
Also nowadays there are lots of trolls waiting for the food on different forums. So we have also the problem how to differentiate user's posts as trollolo or was it just a simple post? User can read someone's post and think: "here it is! he's the troll", but the one who posted that message didn't try to troll or offend somebody. The reason of this problems IMHO is in our (each of us) psychology.
Also even IRL people can have different (even opposite) emotions for the same event.
That's a good idea, the sarcasm tags. Perhaps sarcasm would be portrayed to the reader as a pulsing blue, or red, or some other color.
For sarcasm I usualy just do *sarcasm* [insert text] *sarcasm*, although some people find that quite offensive so I always just go with speaking very literal and have no emotion.
How do you cope with this in your daily digital communication with others
I type words in the hope that people will read them. How they choose to take it is up to them.
As for sarcasm, well, I never use it ever at all under any circumstances whatsoever, but if I were to use it--hypothetically of course--I would just type it in regularly so it would blend in with the "regular" text. The sharper-minded folks would be able to distinguish between sarcasm and normal speech.
As for sarcasm, well, I never use it ever at all under any circumstances whatsoever
I uyse sarcasm alot in regualr speech so it's hard for me to take it out completly
I think that while online you shouldn't jump to conclusions. I knew someone who jumped to conclusions on something I had said, and it was hard for me to explain back what I had meant intentionally. This can be halped by actually asking them to clarify.
I think that while online you shouldn't jump to conclusions. I knew someone who jumped to conclusions on something I had said, and it was hard for me to explain back what I had meant intentionally. This can be halped by actually asking them to clarify.
Yea jumping to conclusions while someone is sending you a mas on the internet is not a good idea, I once had someone do that also but I just gave up because they continued to do that.
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