geek2geek

With all this talk on the blog about all the issues of textual communication the answer would seem to be to avoid text all together. That it’s just doomed and try to do what you can over the phone or face-to-face. I say no, text is not doomed. Text has issues we don’t always appreciate, and that causes problems, but text itself can be used for empathic communications.

When you’re faced with a touchy situation, or one that might be ripe with potential miscommunication like a geek talking to a business guy, it’s often a good idea to boost the emotional bandwidth. Rely more on all that implicit communication we do when speaking rather than having to remember to add it back in explicitly to text.

Here’s some simple rules of thumb for how to boost your bandwidth, from the least to most effective.

Please go on!

Being unaware of what parts of speech text strips away creates an information void which readers tend to fill in with emotions (read the previous entries in the series to catch up on that). Usually negative emotions. As a reader you can watch yourself for this and seek to fill in the voids with actual information. As a writer you can make sure those voids don’t exist in the first place.

Let’s say you get an IM from your boss, “meet in my office in 5 minutes“. How do you feel about that? What do you think your boss is going to talk to you about? “Oh boy, I’m getting a raise!” No, if you’re like me, and my spy network says you are, you start thinking “oh shit… what did I do wrong?” Your reaction is almost always going to be negative. You brace yourself for a fight or tongue lashing. You tense up awaiting the coming conflict. Why?

There’s lots of reasons. Maybe it’s empirical: Every previous time your boss has called you into her office it’s been to be chewed out. Maybe it’s based on prior experience: You once had a boss who every time they called you in you got chewed out. Maybe you’re just a pessimist. Maybe you just don’t like authority figures. Maybe you’ve trained yourself to expect the worst by watching too many episodes of “The Office“.

emotional projection

No matter the reason for it, you are faced with an information void. “Meet in my office in 5 minutes” can mean different things depending on how it’s said, but since it’s text you have none of that information. Humans can’t stand an information void and will start trying to fill it. In this case you’re going to fill in a lack of emotional content with your own previous experiences and emotions. This is what I call “emotional projection” (I don’t know if anyone else calls it that, but it’s useful for building a vocabulary of socialization patterns).

Oh god, I bet the rest of the post is going to suck…

(This is a guest blog post from Selena Deckelmann.)

Let’s say you’re at a conference. There’s some interesting person nearby. You want to talk to them, so you walk up, and say, “Hi, My name is Violet. Can I take a picture of you with me?” The response, “You’re rude.”

You can see her side of the story here. And Fake Steve Job’s take here.

So, maybe that’s not a typical response to a cute girl asking to take your picture.

But approaching a person out of the blue - the in-person equivalent of the “cold call” - is hard. You’ve got to have something interesting to say, then you have to say it, and finally you’re going to have to respond to whatever the other person says. A lot to think and worry about for what may be a 30-second interaction.

Can you tell whether the person you’re talking with is interested in what you’re saying? And if they’re not, can you do anything to make them more interested?

Enter: The Pickup Artist.
Please go on!

When I voiced the observation that “text lacks empathy” to a few friends of mine who are, if not necessarily trained writers, then at least a whole lot better at it than I am, they collectively went, “BUWHAT?!” Which is perfectly justified. Text can certainly invoke emotions in a reader. A good writer can make someone laugh, cry, or even kill. (A great writer can make them snort milk out their nose). So how can I say that text lacks empathy?

text strips emotion, writers put it back

Speech, and other forms of face-to-face communications, contain all sorts of undertones that we’re only dimly aware of. Let’s look at a simple question:

Are you done yet?

Were I to speak it I can convey emotion with a whining voice, slumped down in my seat showing boredom. I can say it with an excited voice while bouncing up and down conveying hope and excitement. I can say it with a neutral tone and expression, it’s a simple query. I can ask with annoyance which makes it more about expressing “you’re late and I’m pissed” then a request for information. Even the history of the conversation becomes important. Even the most polite query becomes annoying when you ask it for the twentieth time.

Now consider how a writer might write in missing emotions.

Yes, let us consider that…

Before I continue on with my grand dissertation on empathy, I would like to take a moment to talk to you about a problem which is currently very near and dear to my heart as a first time bloggeristo: Warnock’s Dilemma.

Has this happened to you? With much excitement you post up your fantastic idea that will OBVIOUSLY change the world and make everyone rich and smell nice and create world peace while still leaving a place for violent video games. And then you wait… and wait… and wait… and no response. Nobody says anything. At this point you are caught in Warnock’s Dilemma.

Named for Bryan Warnock who first fully expressed the dilemma in the early days of the design of Perl 6 — oh god was that EIGHT YEARS AGO?! — the dilemma is how do you interpret a lack of response? Bryan identified five possibilities…

Please go on!

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.