Text Lacks Empathy
Comments: 5 - Date: January 7th, 2008 - By: Schwern - Categories: observation, text, empathy
Table of contents for Text Lacks Empathy
Tags:empathy, observation, text
Are you sitting down? Good, then let’s begin.
There is something wrong with our preferred communications technologies (email, IM, IRC, blogs, web forums, SMS…) and it is this:
text lacks empathy
More accurately, text lacks secondary channels to communicate emotion but you can’t put that on a t-shirt.
Speaking with someone face to face has many lines of communication. First, there are the actual words. This is the text of the conversation but it is certainly not the whole of the meaning.
There’s the tone and inflection, how each word is spoken and where the stresses are placed. Let’s lump that all together into the audio component. Body and hand gestures add more emphasis and emotion even filling in gaps in the text. (How do you get an Italian to shut up? Handcuff them.) Eye contact conveys interest (hey baby). Fidgeting conveys nervousness (and perhaps interest as well). And then there’s the whole range of facial expressions.
Text contains none of this. You just get the words stripped of all the implied emotions we’re used to.
That’s my observation. Next we’ll look at the consequences.
Comment by Yatima - 8 January 2008 @ 4:50
This is all true, and doesn’t go anywhere near far enough. Some of us don’t *want* to convey “all the implied emotions we’re used to.” Women, the disabled, nonwhite people, people who aren’t conventionally attractive, people who *are* conventionally attractive, the shy, the inarticulate, the articulate, people who think body language is coercive bullshit, people who *know* that body language is coercive bullshit, people who are geographically isolated, people who are neurologically isolated, people I haven’t thought of yet. Not all of the above, and lots of people in groups I don’t even know about. I am willing to assert, though, that for a non-zero population, text is a *refuge* from the bland and banal assumptions bound up in physical communications.
I know it is for me.
When I’m interviewing executives for work, I try to do one telephone interview and one face to face. It’s easier to understand what people are trying to tell me face to face. But it’s easier to hear lies on the phone.
Jeremy had an online friend for several years before he discovered that she was blind.
Comment by Schwern - 8 January 2008 @ 10:16
Sorta makes me think of this.
Comment by Hutch - 9 January 2008 @ 18:03
Sometimes the vagueness of interpretation (and forced brevity) is a useful trick. But yes, it is harder to express all the meaning than in person, and thus we’ve invented emoticons. And hey, what about the phone? There you only have the audio component. You also have a little less embarassment potential. Some people who love email and IM and chatting in person simply hate making voice calls. I don’t hate it, but I probably avoid it.
Comment by Adrian Howard - 28 January 2008 @ 21:54
I always liked the “I Didn’t Say You Stole My Money” example.
Comment by Ninya - 23 April 2008 @ 2:00
Yatima- I’ve always wondered, how the hell could a blind person use a computer? Are there special monitors that form everything in braille, some sort of automated text-reader, or what? I know it’s awful, but I’ve always thought loss of the internet would be the worst consequence of blindness. Guess I have an addiction.
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