Comment on My go-to formula
BmeBenji@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Kind of just more evidence that reducing human conversation into writing is reducing human communication to at most a handful of perceivable factors instead of the countless ways in which humans (and animals in general) communicate
Actually the internet supports audio and video. If anything that’s evidence that newspapers, books, and really everything before TV and radio is corrosive to human communication. Well that and text based forums like this are corrosive.
Just because a medium isn’t perfect doesn’t make it corrosive. The problem here is the way human brains deal with things, not the things themselves. TV and video also cause loads of problems, because people treat them as too real. It’s a balance really.
You’re right, but I’m confident enough in saying that most people don’t film videos or record themselves saying what they want to in order to engage online most of the time. I mean to say that dropping a written comment on a Facebook, Reddit, Lemmy, Xitter, etc. post makes it far more easy for people to try to infer meaning where there is none. I’m convinced that sort of indirection that the internet has made a much more common element in human discourse has greatly influenced the increase in political polarization.
For example, if someone posts “#ACAB,”someone who was shot by a cop for stealing a loaf of bread is likely to relate to it and assume that OP completely understands their plight, but someone whose parent or sibling is a cop will likely assume that OP is prejudiced and presumptive when in actuality OP was just posting their gut reaction to the movie 21 Bridges.
Erm have you heard of TikTok or seen what goes on there? Loads of people posting about radical politics. It’s not just text mediums. Radical opinions aren’t new, terrorism and Nazis didn’t start with the internet.
Also a strange example to choose. Cops in America are pretty bad. Police in general support the interests of capital just as much as they help ordinary people. I don’t know if it’s possible to build a society without some form of policing, but the system we have now isn’t great.
And yes, of course there are people posting videos, but the vast majority of communication on the internet is via text by a long shot. My point isn’t that someone is right or wrong in what they infer from or relate to in the writing, but my point is that the prevalence of unreviewed and unedited text in everyday life nowadays thanks to the internet has further increased the average size of the gap between an author’s intent and the meaning that a reader infers from it. What I’m trying to say is that the wider the gap between intended meaning and inferred meaning gets, the more toxic the relationship between any given person and the public at large gets in general. Text-based communication makes it easy for that gap to be wide. Unreviewed text-based communication just widens that gap. Reading a lot of un-reviewed text based communication from other people makes that gap even wider. That’s what I mean by corrosive.
TIL every great work of literature is corrosive to humanity. Guess I’ll burn my bookshelf.
I guess I didn’t include everything I ought to have to make my point (which honestly is evidence for my point).
Books are generally speaking written over long periods of time and go through plenty of editing and revision while internet comments and posts, especially from dumbasses like me, are not.
No, limitations in communication aren’t good or bad they simply create new opportunities. The problem isn’t how much is lost in text, the real problem is that English is being frozen in place because of spellcheck and new slang/patterns can’t evolve to account for the limitations of texting so you have to hamfistedly do stuff like use exclamation points as much as possible without using them in a row.
Spellcheck fundamentally fucks with communication over text because it assumes language is this thing that can be done right, in a correct form, and that mediation from an algorithm creates a huge distance between people that more natural organic conversation doesn’t.
I love emojis for this, although they can certainly come across as cringy.
What about emoticons? Are they cringe too? :/
Aren’t they the same ?
You write 😂
I write =)
We are not the same
Hadriscus@lemm.ee 3 months ago
I agree that text is poor in conveying intent, tone, etc. but text predates the internet by at least a couple years
Klear@lemmy.world 3 months ago
The oldest written text I’ve found in three seconds of research in contained in this ancient meme, which is believed to have originated in the early days of the internet. So while it’s not enough to disprove your claim, it seems to suggest that text and internet actually started roughly at the same time, possibly building on top of each other.
Hadriscus@lemm.ee 3 months ago
See this is why I love Lemmy. There’s always an academic around to point you in the right direction. Cheers !
BmeBenji@lemm.ee 3 months ago
I meant to make a point about how the internet has made unedited written conversation far more prevalent in everyday life. Edited and peer-reviewed writing is different from the majority of what people read and write on a daily basis (including myself, because obviously my initial comment could’ve used more time in the oven)
Hadriscus@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Absolutely, I understand. I was trying to be humorous but clearly text has failed me, and humanity at large, once again.