No one can deny the enormous benefits brought by digital communication. However, being able to communicate with people without actually seeing or hearing them has downsides too. We lose the social cues offered by nonverbal communication.
Posts Tagged Under: emoticon
We believe communication is incomplete without emotion. This year, Oxford confirmed it. Here’s how it went down.
Photo by Fausto García on Unsplash
I can still remember the first time I saw a smiley face. : ) I couldn’t understand it because it wasn’t a pictogram and it hadn’t arrived with an instruction manual – “tilt your head to the left.” All I could see was a colon and a parenthesis. I was failing at the one thing I normally did best: visualize. It could have been a mild form of dyslexia (which I may or may not have because I never got it diagnosed), but I blame it on the missing bits.
I was with a friend at the time and I had asked him to explain it to me. He obliged, but nonetheless mocked my poor observation skills, which ensued my aversion towards this alien language made up of punctuation marks. They were everywhere and I didn’t get them. When I finally did manage to commit some to memory, I incorporated them into my own texts – for I had found them necessary to relate to those who fired them in my direction – but I would still scratch my head at the arrival of a new specimen. Like <3. The whole of planet Earth saw a heart, I saw an arrow tip and a three.