In 2014, Sue Shellenbarger, writing for The Wall Street Journal, described the frustration and stress we often feel when trying to decipher a cryptic email from a supervisor. Here, she details an exchange between an employee and her boss:
Jill Campen was baffled recently when her boss Marty Finkle fired back a one-word reply to her carefully thought-out email asking for his approval on a client-training presentation she had prepared: “Done!” Ms. Campen, a consultant at Scotwork North America in Parsippany, N.J., puzzled over the message for a half-hour, then decided she was too upset to resolve the matter by email. She called Mr. Finkle and asked, “What is going on with you? ‘Done?’ What does that mean?”
In his oft-cited book, Silent Messages, Albert Mehrabian states that roughly 93% of nonverbal cues are missing in written communiqués. Only 7% “credibility” was assigned to the actual words used. If this figure is accurate, it is reasonable to assume that the amount of misunderstanding occurring among people who converse via email, texting, and Twitter, is also very high. Compounding this problem is the sheer number of electronic messages we receive annually. According to the Radicati Group, a Technology Market Research Firm, in 2017,
the total number of business and consumer emails sent and received per day will reach 269 billion, and is expected to continue to grow at an average annual rate of 4.4% over the next four years, reaching 319.6 billion by the end of 2021.
The number of text messages sent is higher. The total number sent annually by AT&T customers alone, tops 931.5 billion. And according to Internet Live Stats,
every second, on average, around 6000 tweets are tweeted on Twitter, which corresponds to over 350,000 tweets per minute, 500 million tweets per day, and around 200 billion tweets per year.
With an increasing number of people reading these communiqués while on the move, and on small, hand-held devices, the potential for misunderstanding seems inescapable. How then can we be sure we are understood when communicating electronically?
Effective communication requires more than words. Language is contextual and dependent on a host of environmental factors, e.g., tone of voice, gestures, and facial expressions. Although we lack these features when communicating electronically, over the course of the last decade, skilled internet/text users have developed new ways of disambiguating communiqués. Through the use of emoticons and acronyms, text-based representations of feelings and emotions serve to communicate what people often struggle to convey with the written word. Indeed, the meaning behind a widely understood symbol or a strategically placed acronym can establish not only the necessary context, but can also assist in conveying sentiment.
In his posthumously published work, Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein defines language as a rule-guided activity: grammatical rules may determine whether we are using language correctly or incorrectly, but because we use it in a community, non-linguistic rules, norms, and customs play a role here too. “Speaking [a] language,” says Wittgenstein, “is part of an activity” (1953, §23). We are bound by a shared set of complex, verbal and non-verbal practices. To speak a language then, is to participate in that culture. Without tone of voice, facial expressions, gestures, etc., comprehending meaning from the mere written word can prove difficult. This difficulty is only exacerbated when the conversation takes place online. New communal on-line practices are replacing our old ones, leaving us without the necessary tools needed to discern meaning. But without these points of reference, what can we do?
Some of the more extreme views advocate a complete and wholesale purging of technology. Technology that encourages and fosters quick, superficial, and thoughtless responses, they argue, should be jettisoned. In our modern world, abbreviated sentences, texting, and tweets only serve to diminish the richness, variety, and expressiveness found in language. In order to preserve this richness, we must therefore eliminate these devices from our lives.
While ridding one’s self of this technology may sound liberating, it is simply unrealistic. When a new technological device is introduced that makes our lives easier, and when people come to rely on it, rarely do we reverse course. But more importantly, the focus here is misplaced—it is not the device itself, but the content that flows through it. There are a number of different devices through which the communication is dispensed, but ultimately, it is the quality of the message that is most important. With this point in mind, others have argued for a return to crafting lengthier, more carefully thought-out missives.
Writing a longer, deliberative message won’t entirely solve the current problem, but advocates of this approach say that slowing things down and carefully proof-reading a communiqué before sending it can only prove beneficial. While I am sympathetic to this view, it does elicit two related problems. First, since so much non-written linguistic communication is omitted in emails, texts, tweets, etc., this approach would place a heavy burden on our ability to write clearly and effectively. Secondly, in addition to being both longer and more deliberative, these communications would also require us to take the time to consider how the person on the receiving end might interpret our communiqué. While this does have the potential to dramatically cut down on misunderstanding and miscommunication, our ability to imagine the various ways in which what we write might be misconstrued is an enormous responsibility, one that could prolong delivery (for some of us, indefinitely). So, while taking the time to craft lengthier, carefully thought-out messages is a good idea, it is, at the same time, not always practical. Extended, thoughtful communiqués, by their very nature, are more time-consuming to craft, which runs counter to the very purpose of this technology in the first place.
Another view, however, comes from the skilled internet/text users who have invented, in their language-games, ways of disambiguating communiqués. These include the use of emoticons, acronyms, and the careful and strategic deployment of emotive words such as “<sarcasm>”. Indeed, even variations in the way punctuation is used are being repurposed. The meaning behind a well-known symbol can assist in conveying sentiment without having to phrase it in what might otherwise be an ambiguous or opaque sentence.
While emoticons, text slang, etc., obviously cannot replace all of the nuances involved in a face-to-face discussion, they can provide meaningful context for the recipient—especially in exchanges where meaning might otherwise be vague, ambiguous, or absent. This includes delivering the recipient with a good sense of the speaker’s intent. If such additions to the online language-game can help to un-muddle an otherwise unclear message, it seems to me they ought to be accepted.
Among the many prominent and popular themes found in the Investigations is Wittgenstein’s idea that our language is deeply interwoven with its use (1953, §43). This makes the different functions of expressions sound more like the different functions of tools we might find in a tool-kit (1953, §11). But if we can sharpen or hone our tools, if we can improve on the clarity in a language-game by supplementing it with emotional icons, especially those language-games that otherwise lack crucial points of reference—i.e., tone of voice, gestures, and facial expressions—perhaps we might also be able to improve on our meaning. If so, emoticons, text-slang, etc. could be seen as an improvement on our language-tool.
In the Stone Age, the evolution of a standard, ubiquitous tool like the knife began with a relatively small adjustment, i.e., affixing a handle to what was otherwise just a sharp piece of flint or bone. In the Digital Age, if the purpose of our language-tool is to convey speaker meaning more clearly and accurately, it may then require us to become more tolerant of the use of emoticons, text-slang, etc. in our correspondences.
Robert Greenleaf Brice
Robert Greenleaf Brice is an assistant professor in the department of Philosophy at Loyola University New Orleans, and the author of Exploring Certainty: Wittgenstein and Wide Fields of Thought. He is currently working on a guidebook to Wittgenstein’s On Certainty for Springer Publishing.
