This week’s Blogging topic was the “wild card” theme were we had the opportunity to write about any internet experience that we have had with communication. The experience I decided to write about was an incident I had with a friend not too long ago, it was a conversation we had on the new Facebook Chat. The conversation started out with the normal casual greetings but then suddenly took a turn for the worse.
My friend began to tell me about this new guy she had just recently began to see, and was totally into him. Before I knew it I felt like I had met the guy 500 times with the information overload on this guys likes and dislikes. I could tell she really liked him. Along with being a little boy crazy, my friend can also be a little dramatic and in the past has had a tendency to drive the guys she is interested in away because of this personality trait.
When I’m with all my girlfriends we are usually a pretty crazy bunch and we like to be sarcastic and poke fun with at one another, its part of our relationship. So when I was talking to my Friend online and I thought I could be myself and give her a shot. I was telling her how great of a guy he sounds like, and that she better not show her true colors if she wants this one to stick around. After I had said this I didn’t get a response back from her for a couple minutes, when all of a sudden she comes back and starts screaming (I could tell she was screaming because she was typing in all caps and all the exclamation points she was using after every sentence) at me. Telling me how rude of a friend I was, and that she really likes this guy and she is going to do anything she can to make it work. In between all of her rude comments I was trying to explain to her that I was merely kidding, and didn’t mean to upset her at all. I told her any guy would be lucky to have her, and that I didn’t mean what I said.
This all happened because we were not face to face and she couldn’t read any of my body language to go along with my joke. That’s the trouble with cyberspace communication; people can take things so literally, because there is no indication of what is either a joke or a factual statement.
This is directly out of chapter 9 of Postmans book, he questions if humans need qualities such as intuition and logic due to the major influence of technology in our lives, do we need to be able to think on our own. From my experience that I explained with my friend it goes to show that what pops up on your computer screen isn’t always reliable information, and my friend should of used logic to know that I was only kidding and my comment was not intended to hurt her, but to make her laugh.
Online chat can be hazardous! I normally feel like misinterpretations online sort of even out because all though we cannot express tone or show body language, we are allotted more time to craft what we are trying to say. Chatting, on the other hand, rips those benefits out of the picture. I have had similar experiences and understand the stress.
I agree with you that your friend should have added some outside insight to the conversation. Although words are flat, it is both possible and important to use real life information to better interpret the text. The question of “Would this person try to hurt me?” probably could have made your friend a lot more understanding of the comment.
Good post this week.
Yeah this seems to be a common theme on messenger type programs, the non-verbal and intonations are hard to interpret correctly, and therefore people like your friend become disgruntled because of their misinterpretation.
On a side not, and somewhat irrelevant, when my mum first started using email she would always write in caps lock. Little did she know that it means that loud or angry communication. It’s funny because people would ask her is she was okay (as if she were angry or frustrated with something), not knowing that she did not know the meaning of using caps lock in emails. Don’t ask me why she thought it was normal to write in caps lock in the beginning–lol.
It sounds like you had one fun online conversation. I always think it is hilarious when people type in Caps, as if this is supposed to make their email seem more profound. My best friend types in caps, always when she is trying to get her point across to me, and it drives me crazy. I find it so hard at times to communicate online, because it is so easy for people to take things out of content. At least when your face-to-face you can hear the words, see a person’s facial expression, and then judge what a person is trying to really say.
Good blog this week, it was enjoyable to read.