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Context is really important in communication. When speaking with someone face to face, you pick up on vocal intonations and body language to give you context to
by jbob2000 11y ago
Context is really important in communication. When speaking with someone face to face, you pick up on vocal intonations and body language to give you context to their speech. As well, knowing someone personally gives context to what they are saying.
On the internet, you have none of those things, only text. I think we are hitting a wall with our written languages because they can't adequately communicate context. Emoticons are a great evolution in this respect, because I can assign emotional context to some writing with a simple set of characters :).
- tacos 11y agoI liked this exact comment when I first read it back in 1985. At least now I can upvote it. That's progress.
- theseatoms 11y agoHow about more voting dimensions?
- munificent 11y agoI like your point that context and audience are the problem, but I don't think it's an issue with text as much as it is the web. If I give you a hand-written note, I know exactly who is reading it (at least at first, how many embarrassing stories involve a note that ended up in the wrong hands?) and I can presume that in my writing. But when I write a blog post on the web, it's stapled to a bulletin board that has the eyes of the entire world. I have no idea who will read it today, tomorrow, or years from now. I don't know who will take pieces of it out of context and repost them elsewhere. It is honestly scary. I was going through some old posts of mine a while back and felt like they were funnier and a more brave. Several years have slowly but surely toned me down, often for the worse. I have to constantly remind myself to be courageous in my writing. I have to remember to focus on how the right reader will experience it, and tune out the wrong ones.