February 8, 2008
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Online Communication – The Poker Face
The thing about text based online communication is that everybody has a sort of perfect poker face. It’s just like when you are playing poker online as opposed to in RL. In RL, somebody can notice when you are upset or when you angry over what cards you’ve gotten and they can notice your tells and quirks and use all of that information to defeat you. But online, that aspect disappears and poker becomes, primarily, about the probabilities. It’s just all about playing the numbers.
When chatting with someone online there’s a similar phenomenon. Ordinarily if someone says something to you that makes you angry or sad or disappointed or jealous or upset, they know right away. Because most of us just have really terrible poker faces. There is a map to our inner emotional state splayed across our faces and in our eyes and in our nervous twitches and in our tone of voice and in a thousand other oh so subtle physical signals that an observant being can use to divine exactly how you are reacting to something that they are saying.
No so with text based online communication. Not so in chat rooms and IMs and emails and newsgroups and forums. There, we can *choose* to reveal our emotional state with emoticons and smileys and by choosing certain words and saying things in certain ways. But we don’t *have* to. We can hide behind a perfect stoic poker face and show nothing, reveal nothing and let the person we are speaking to think that everything is a-ok. Even if someone says something to you that makes a little part of you die on the inside, you can finish off the pleasant conversation as if nothing ever happened.
But this is an over generalization. It isn’t entirely true. Because there are some things we can’t control or at least can’t control as well. Most notably, our silences. During moments when you don’t know what to say. When you are shocked or appalled or enraged or deeply hurt, most of us have to take a moment to collect ourselves before we can react. Before we can respond. And when we do respond, usually our responses aren’t as natural as they were. We hesitate. We try too hard to figure out what to say. Often, ironically, we struggle so hard to ensure that the person we are speaking to doesn’t catch on to how upset we are that our communication becomes so unnatural that we give it away that something is up in the process.
And I think people have gotten pretty good at this. At reading silences and unnatural flows in conversation and shifts in language that reveal that more is going on then there appears to be. On a number of occasions I’ve been shocked to have someone I am speaking to suddenly ask me if I’m ok, divining at once that something was bothering me even though I didn’t do anything purposeful to reveal my emotional state. When I look back over the conversations I don’t see anything in particular that must have clued the person in, and yet never has someone done this and been inaccurate in their assessment. Invariably something in fact was bothering me, though sometimes I still pretend that nothing is.
It’s funny eh? I don’t think video and audio communication will ever completely replace text messaging online just because people enjoy that sense of security they get from being able to control what they reveal to one another. And yet as online text based communication becomes more and more a staple of our lives the more that perceived advantage disappears anyway. One day we may be just as good at reading peoples words as we are reading their faces.
Comments (3)
I have gotten in trouble at work when an email “sounded” negative and was taken out of context and misunderstood. I got put on disciplinary warning and got called into an office and reprimanded. When I finally got a chance to explain where I was coming from, the accuser understood why I wrote it the way I did. It was too late, however, because others higher up had become involved and it couldn’t be retracted. The disciplinary action stood, despite the fact it was bogus.
Nowadays, when I write a company email it is nothing but facts and questions about facts. Nobody can read anything into cold facts and data. The worst they can say is that I am not a very creative, entertaining writer. Oh well.
@polymergoddess - I absolutely hated writing emails at work. It took me ten times longer than it should have to convey what I wanted to say because I had to be so careful to follow protocol and not say anything that would step on anyone’s toes. Plus I had to try and restrain my usual verbose self in order to ensure that anyone would even bother to read it. People seem to have an inordinately short attention span at least in the business and IT world.
Hurrah, that’s what I was trying to get for, just what a stuff Presented at this blog!! Thanks admin of the site.
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