The ability to choose between different types of communication channels is mainly a good implication of the social media technologies. However, the new ways to interact with people might not always be as good as the classic face-to-face interactions. There is always another side of the coin.
When talking face-to-face to a person it is quite easy to understand what that person is trying to say. Except from the obvious part such as the spoken words, the body language helps the receiver to interpret the message. When changing the communication channel to a phone the situation becomes different; the distortions in the channel increase. It is more difficult to understand when the body language is lost. The receiver has to listen to the tone of voice to understand the message. Using MSN as a communication channel the distortions increases even more. Now the body language is lost, as well as the tone of the voice. All that the sender can use to convey the message is the keyboard. Therefore the sender has to exaggerate and emphasise the words with smileys. My experience is that it is not only the smileys that differs in the language of MSN-chatting. As an example the good-bye-word is often replaced by “kisses” or “hugs”. Some say kiss to friends that they do not kiss in real life. For me the reason must be the distortions in the channel, since you cannot moderate the tone of your voice you have to exaggerate. Using only the word “good bye” might be more uninteresting compared to “kiss”.
Another aspect of using MSN or other computer chatting is that the receiver is waiting for your reply as you write. Therefore you want to write as fast as possible. This phenomenon has a variety of implications.
First of all, the language written becomes very simple and very few nuanced words are used. There is no time to think of what words that could be suitable to express what you want to say and there is no time for long and complex sentences. To express what you really feel smileys are used instead of nuanced words. The smileys can be used to mark that this sentence was ironical, even if I say this I do it with a smile. Because you cannot use all the words that you use when you talk or write without someone waiting for reply all the time the language used becomes fairly simple.
Secondly, the spelling comes in second hand. If you don’t know how to spell a word, there is no time to look it up. You try one way of spelling it and the other person understands you anyway. For me this is quite dangerous. When I see a word spelled in different ways I become unsure about how it is supposed to look. In the end no one knows how to spell the words. Even if you know how a word should be spelled, you might think that you will have to put much effort in writing all the letters and thus you take a shorter way around it. For me, the fact that I use a computer keyboard more than I use a pen results in difficulties to know how to spell words when I write by hand. I cannot see if the words I have written with my own hand are right spelled because I hardly ever write the words by hand.
Lastly, I would like to bring up what implications a simple language can have on your thoughts. I have been to England a couple of times. One summer I was there for two weeks without speaking hardly any Swedish at all. I learnt a lot of English, but I can of course not speak as fluently as I can speak my mother tongue. I experienced that my brain was adjusting itself to only think and speak in English. But since I did not know all the words I used the words that I knew. When I came back to Sweden I was quite bad at speaking Swedish. My brain was thinking in the same way and therefore I did not use all the words I could have used. I believe that using only a few words in conversations over the Internet can affect our vocabulary and therefore how we think. We might not be less intelligent, but I definitely believe that the words we use will form our way of thinking.
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