A while back Bonnie pointed out how people engaging in online text communication liberally use expressions such as LOL (Laughing Out Loud) to soften the real meaning of what they are saying. In part doing so helps them cope against miscalculation is a channel where substantial error can arise without the benefit of paralinguistic information (gestures etc). Research seems to suggest that the motivation for this communicative waffling is well founded. It would appear that we are significantly prone to miscalculate the meaning in text messages because our "(s)ocial judgement is inherently egocentric"...
In "Egocentrism Over Email: Can We Communicate as Well as We Think?" [1.] we are led to believe that about half of the people using email are: a.) likely to believe that they are more effective at communicating using email than they actually are; and b.) the sender's "over-confidence' is a result of an egocentrism - an inability to evaluate what they write from the other person's perspective. Folks in this case appear terrible at distinguishing the writer's voice (e.g. "sarcastic"). Discerning outright humor fared worse. The authors suggested that more dynamic mediums such as chat and gaming environments would only compound the problem. As Clive Thompson notes:
there are a couple of conclusions here. Either a) people are crappy writers; b) people are crappy readers; or c) a subtle mixture of the two governs all online communiations, ensuring that we have no clue what the hell anyone else is trying to say.
However, the optimist, I am inclined to believe that online language may be more robust (adaptive) in ways that email in structured channels can never be: redundancy and language softeners can go a long way to take one to a point... eventually. It just means you have to have the time and patience and be able to manage all that chat.
LOL!
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[1.] Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2005, Vol 89, No. 6. 925-6.
