Psychologeek Post, do not read
I’m having a really psychologically geeky moment here, so most readers may wish to skip this one altogether. If not, you were warned.
I had a random thought on the subject of text messaging. It really is a different form of communication not only for it being at a midpoint between written and spoken language, but because of the time delay of typing and being able to type at the same time makes for a different sort of thinking. I notice it a lot of I type to people that are new to text messaging or don’t do it a lot, and I start to get very frustrated and confused because they don’t know how to text properly.
What skills are required to text message properly? A few basics: it requires first that you are able to type fast enough to express yourself in real time, (two finger typing is okay, as long as you are fast). If you are too slow, the person ends up doing something else at the same time and the conversation stagnates. Emotionally ambiguous phases should be modified with emoticons, which have themselves taken on slightly different meanings from what they would in a face to face conversation. For example, you may say something that could be taken as a joke or harshly, but putting the symbol : P afterwards (looked at sideways it’s a guy with his tongue out, most chat programmes now convert this into a right-side-up face automatically) will soften the effect. Since we don’t do this in real life I have no idea how it got to be such a universally understood symbol, but it is. At least in non-teenaged circles, proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation, and a minimum of superfluous stupid symbols which automatically appear with letter combinations and especially that blink or twirl (unless they really are funny and used sparsely) are greatly appreciated .Sentence fragments are perfectly acceptable and are often more efficient. It’s good to use ellipses to break a long idea into parts so that your reader has something to do while you’re finishing a thought.
The main skill people need to learn is to be able to keep two or three ideas separate, because while you are typing your reply to an idea, your partner may take the conversation in a different direction. You finish what you were saying, and then you reply to what they said while they are answering you, so you normally have two overlapping conversations going with each person you are talking to. If your conversation partner is not used to this, they will keep asking what you are talking about, since they will think your last phrase referred to what they said directly before, when in fact they should be connecting the conversation several lines up. Good text messengers also have to keep in mind the background of their partners and their language capability, which helps them to gauge how little they can write and still get a meaning across clearly, which keeps the conversation fast and therefore fluid.
There are several levels of conversation intensity. A low intensity conversation allows you to talk to more than one person at once, and possibly accomplish some online or offline task simultaneously, though to be polite you should match the frequency of reply with your conversation partner (usually their history is the best indication, though of course it changes depending on other conditions). In most cases you should still say goodbye when you intend to wander off or get bored, though that could be a Canadian remnant. A high intensity conversation can be identified by subject matter and/or by response frequency. During an emotionally serious conversation, a potentially bad misunderstanding, or conversation of a personal nature, or even a lighthearted conversation in which you are both responding quickly, unannounced changes in frequency or long absences are not appreciated and should be announced unless it is impossible. If notification is not possible, an apology and short explanation afterwards is a good idea.
There is also an extensive text messaging etiquette - phone calls and other interruptions are usually cheerfully accepted as taking priority, but an absence should be preceded by “brb” (be right back) or “gtg” (got to go) or more specifically, “phone”. People marked as “busy” should not be bothered, people marked as “away” can be sent a quick query but if they do answer they are probably hiding should not be bothered for long because they are probably doing something else or engaged in another conversation. If you are getting to know someone and you have initiated contact once or twice in a row, you should wait for them to initiate contact even if you see they are online… new people on your list will naturally establish a chat initiation frequency after some time, and if this ends up being really low compared with the amount you see them online, you may want to bump them off your list because they don’t really care you exist. There’s always more where that came from but I think I got it out of my system and should take care of my Insufficient Sleep problem.
November 14th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
BTW, IMHO, carrying on three separate conversations at once is fraught with danger; however, once you get the hang of it, and the person with whom you are holding three separate conversations is aware of the potential for misconstruings causing serious interrelationship problems, the process is relatively reasonably confusion-free. But then, who am I to comment? After all, I have the great advantage of having known the uncommon workings of my daughter’s brain for about 24 years.