geek2geek

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…

In We Don’t Write, We Speak With Our Fingers, I gave an example of how speaking with text can lead to misinterpretation. It was kind of weak. Adrian Howard tipped me off to this much better example:

This sentence is interesting in that if you say the sentence seven times, each time placing the emphasis on a different word, the meaning of the sentence shifts.

Try it…

1. I Didn’t Say You Stole My Money.
2. I Didn’t Say You Stole My Money.
3. I Didn’t Say You Stole My Money.
4. I Didn’t Say You Stole My Money.
5. I Didn’t Say You Stole My Money.
6. I Didn’t Say You Stole My Money.
7. I Didn’t Say You Stole My Money.

[GREETINGS STUMBLERS! Feedburner informs me that this post has been StumbleUpon‘d. Some 40,000 of you so far. I’m glad folks are enjoying this post, and perhaps you’d consider looking at the rest of the blog?  Or maybe subscribe to it? Maybe read some Klingon dating tips or how We Don’t Write, We Speak With Our Fingers]

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.