I was sure that was the game of Life. Colour me disappointed.
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My turn. Somewhat left field.
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Your exact words were “It’s those moments of intimate, unspoken under standing that are hardest to experience in text.” I’m not sure what you mean by “text” if not words.
I was aware that your primary focus was on two different modes of pictorial communication. But it seemed to me that part of the conceptual background of this contrast was an assumption about pictorial vs. linguistic communication, one that you perhaps took so much for granted that you didn’t even assert it in a main clause but buried it in a subordinate clause. And that apparent assumption jumped out at me, because it’s one that I don’t make and in fact disagree with. So I called attention to it.
I’m not really able to comment on your primary point, because the nonstandard image you favor doesn’t even suggest a concept or emotion to me; I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make with the two images.
I don’t know what to tell you if you insist on ignoring me telling you explicitly what I think in exchange for you interpreting a sentence that might not have been the best and clearest distillation of what I was getting at. As I said, it was not a general philosophy about language, it was an aside about why attempts to homogenize and generalize emoji styles across various services seem misplaced to me.
By text I meant literally text. This is distinct from, say, in-person conversation. Non-verbal communication is a common and important part of human interaction that is difficult to replicate in a text-only format. Even in verbal communication, tone is incredibly difficult to communicate over text.
I’m sorry that this has gotten so difficult. I do understand that you’re talking about the difference between two styles of icons. I just don’t feel competent to say anything about it. If it’s any help, that also means that I don’t disagree with the point you were making.
I focused on what for you was a secondary point. You took it to be “not . . . the best and clearest distillation of what I was getting at”; I took it to be, not a miscommunication of your point about icons, but an accurate communication of what you actually thought about the difference between text and icons. And that’s something where I do have an opinion, and one that differs from the one you expressed. So that’s what I was commenting on.
When I referred to words I meant, in fact, words in text. But, for example, I have never heard a recording of e.e. cummings reading his verse aloud; but I find the printed words on the page quite as expressive as I do those of T.S. Eliot, whose recorded voice I HAVE heard. Likewise Kipling’s prose fiction, or J.R.R. Tolkien’s letters. I don’t aspire to be as skilled in the use of language as they were, but I think of them as giving me a mark to aim at in using language expressively; I’m not prepared to just say, Oh, well, text on a page can’t convey what I really feel, so I’ll rely on little pictures to get the emotion across. Quite apart from my poor comprehension of emoji, which would make using them difficult, I think that text gives us all kinds of tools for conveying how a sentence is meant to be voiced, and it’s my job as a writer to learn to use those tools better.
And if I have trouble communicating in text, as seems to be the case in this conversation, that means I need to do a better job.
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I don’t think it’s remotely disparaging of poetry to suggest that, for the purposes of general conversation in particular, people tend to rely heavily on gestures, expressions, tone of voice, and other non-textual clues. Painting this as a failure to communicate adequately through words alone seems to me rather misguided. This is not an attack on poetry, it’s a reference to a near universal reality of human communication: that it rarely relies on words alone.
Especially in the context of a novel or a poem, one can do many things with words. That has little bearing on general communication. Poems can be improvised, but often they take an incredible amount of time to write and edit and workshop for their length in actual text. Poetry is a very long way from what we’re talking about.
I think it’s fairly evident that people struggle with expressing tone in a virtual space and have developed solutions ranging from new coinages to reaction images to emoji to stage directions to get across elements of conversation that are more difficult to express over text than in person. This is an observation of organic processes of human communication in digital fora, not a condemnation of the written word.
Outside of intentional written art, homework, or a literal job, it isn’t a person’s job in a given conversation to specifically write well but rather to get their idea across effectively. There are a lot of tools for doing that in digital spaces. Words are just one.
Tone of voice is a really important part of in-person conversation that does not translate well to text. A writer can describe a tone without that being unduly distracting, but it can feel very cumbersome to simply describe one’s own tone in a casual conversation over text. There’s nothing wrong with taking the Elcor approach to online communications, but people tend not to want to do that for a variety of cultural reasons. Again, this is not to disparage the written word. It’s still a reality of how many people communicate including myself.
In summary, I’m not talking about a lacking quality of words. Nothing about words has to be inadequate or broken for a literal picture of a smile to be preferred by many people to saying “This makes me smile.” The fault isn’t in words–people just enjoy communicating that they are smiling, and there are other tools for doing that they gravitate towards than words for doing that. Just so, I’m not comparing words to images in some grand sense. This isn’t a battle between the two. It’s not that words cannot convey complex emotions. I’m noting that the way a lot of people like to communicate–and the way I like to communicate–relies heavily on things that are not as comfortably offloaded into words as into other things. It’s a matter of style and rhythm and feel, not just of mere possibility. We have access to other things than words, so this isn’t a problem or a failing to write well.
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I despise texting as an everyday communication medium for this very reason. But it’s ubiquitous across every social group I am a member of over in meatspace.
“Of course there is a perfectly effective and traditional way of expressing context in a purely textual medium,” he said, leaning back in his armchair and re-lighting his pipe. With a frown, he added: “I didn’t invent it, of course.”
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I saw a headline recently claiming that people somehow get audio cues from the gestures people make, even when they can’t see each other. Didn’t read the article though, sorry.
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Sure! Mind, this forum–unusually well suited to long-form conversation for a social media space–is not exactly filled with naturalistic examples of people doing that on a regular basis in casual conversation.
There’s probably something resembling a reason for that, though strict and reductive explanations aren’t really the point.
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The USENET group alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo was founded on the basis of being a sort of text-based virtual reality, using storytelling tools. It rapidly turned into a place where people posted cyberpunk stories (some of them very good). But it was an interesting experiment.
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I remember being part of a lot of older role-playing communities like that. By the time I was internet savvy it was more lots of little forums and such than IRC or USENET though.
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I don’t think I agree with that first sentence.
I lately wrote to a very good friend whose aunt died, not many weeks ago, in a place that cares for the aged. I thought very carefully about what I wanted to express, and how to do so, and I went through a couple of revisions before I was ready to send it. I wanted to express what I felt, but I also wanted to say what she needed to hear, and not just blurt out whatever was in my head.
That’s so clumsy a tool that I wouldn’t use it. I would try to use syntax, word choice, and punctuation in such a way that the tone came through.
And really, isn’t putting in emoticons precisely a shorthand for the very “describing one’s own tone” that you decry?
It can be. But I think it can also be performative, to “fit in” with the style associated with a particular group. (One might argue that much of language choice works this way.)
Thank you. I texted while we were in transit from California to Kansas, and while we waiting for our broadband to be restored; but I largely gave it up once I had access to e-mail again, except for one friend who can’t figure out how to use e-mail (and often leaves her phone turned off). And I’ve never felt any impulse to sign up on Facebook, because it encourages written statements that are too short to be interesting.
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Given that my take-away from our one and only exchange was that you negated my attempt at a return to civility and accused me of aggressive pedantry, I’m going to be generous and assume that yes, this is the case.
I did no such thing; you have misconstrued my final sentence, which I see, looking back at it, was syntactically ambiguous. When I wrote that
I intended a parallel construction: I was frustrated . . . and [I was] pedantically insisting. That is, I was deprecating my own previous communication. Had I meant the parallelism to apply to you I would have omitted the comma: seeming not to understand what I was trying to say and pedantically insisting . . . But I can see that that single punctuation mark was probably too slight a support for that difference of meaning.
As to negating your attempt to return to civility, I first told you that you had done nothing that required an apology and then said that nonetheless I accepted yours if you felt it was needed. I don’t understand how that is rejecting civility. Can you explain what you would have felt to be an acceptance of that attempt?emphasized text
Well, there we go, “syntactic ambiguity” is the explanation. No hard feelings and we can return the thread to emojis.
The impression of negation was the result of the whole of the post, not just the first two sentences in isolation - now that the context has changed, the negation no longer occurs.
It isn’t my job in a given conversation to write well. That is, being dedicated to the art of using words to the exclusion of other things has very little to do with carrying on conversations and communicating effectively. In general, using whatever tools are available to communicate effectively is entirely reasonable. There is no inherent obligation for me to put skill in written language above just plain getting the idea across.
Writing letters has very little to do with texting or instant messaging. They’re different formats. This is smelling increasingly like pointless elitism that has no grounding in an understanding of how or why people use different communication methods. There are a lot of exceedingly good reasons to text or instant message as opposed to writing a letter. Letters are not a catch-all communicative tool.
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That’s a weird escalation. I said people tend not to write that way for a variety of reasons. That’s hardly decrying.
The short answer is: Sure, why not.
I’m going to put on my hot-take hat for a second and say something controversial: people often find shorthand to be really useful and effective when communicating with other people. For a variety of reasons, " 
" seems to be preferred in online conversation to more elaborate ways of getting that idea across in words. Some of those reasons are very obvious practicalities. Others have to do with, as you say, the clumsy mindfeel of more explicit approaches to expressing non-verbal elements of conversation in text. Sure, I could spend several minutes applying a poet’s attention to communicating complex, non-verbal ideas in a way that both feels fluid to read and gets the idea across (time commitments entirely aside, this is hardly a guarantee you’ll get said idea across; interpretations of the written word can vary wildly even when reading E.E.Cummings). Or I could put in some shorthand the person I’m talking to will understand well enough for jazz. Quality of communication is not determined by how much sweat you put into it. There is a time and a place to spend several minutes on a single sentence–informal chatter is generally not that time, even on a forum.
The long answer is: no.
When I type " " it is not a direct substitute for typing “Gwathdring said, smiling slightly.” The distinction is a bit fiddly, so bear with me here. I’m not trying to replace a long-form description of my facial expressions. Absent emoji, I wouldn’t revert to writing out what my facial expressions look like. Rather, having a rapid way to communicate non-verbal ideas as a sort of punctuation in the middle of a text conversation creates an entirely new mode of text-based conversation more so that it creates a shorthand. This leads to things like @RogerBW mentioned, with these particles taking on meanings idiosyncratic to a specific community. It also leads to things like the interactions I alluded to with my partner. Calling these shorthand for verbal descriptions misses the forest for the trees–they absolutely can be, but I don’t think it’s a particularly useful way to frame how these particles get used in general.
Forget emoji for a second. Let’s take abbreviations that begin explicitly as a shorthand for something. LOL from Laughing Out Loud and ROFL from Rolls On Floor Laughing. First of all, even in their earlier and more directly abbreviating forms, these were frequently not literal. They weren’t a shorthand for describing one’s actual tone and behavior like a third-person narrator, they were looser particles that took on their own meaning. This has become particularly pronounced with modern usage of “lol” to the point that I no longer consider it an abbreviation in most usage cases–that’s now mere etymology for many people rather than meaning.
Consider similarly the difference between typing: heh, ha, hahahah, etc.These will each mean different things to different people, but the crucial element is that they’re not always (or, in my experience, often) an attempt to explicitly form a shorthand for describing one’s own laugh. Rather they’re used to present a particular aesthetic or tone in communicating laughter or even in just communicating mild amusement.
Anyway, even taken as mere shorthand that doesn’t really get us anywhere with respect to the whole “try to write better” idea. It becomes a bit like suggesting that using contractions shows insufficient effort in wordsmithing. Language doesn’t come from the heavens engraved on a stone tablet for us to draw from in a true and correct way. The usefulness of a given approach to language is entirely caught up in who you’re communicating with and the format you’re using to communicate. I won’t begrudge anyone sticking to their comfort zone, but trying to assert that there’s some lacking effort involved in communication styles adapting to new formats and, for that matter, to new people strikes me as rather silly. You’re welcome to tell the sand it’s a poor excuse for a rock, but that has very little bearing on the experience of the sand.
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