e-bodylanguage

I will call you later

2010-05-07T14:06:00.001+01:00

'I'll call you later' has to be a pet hate of mine as it invariably means sometime much later, and maybe not at all.

Why is it that we are so keen to use these sort of phrases in our virtual communications? Is it because we don't have the virtual equivalent of a handshake, air kiss or smile?

So what are your endnotes virtually, do they make sense - do they send a clear and unambigious message to the reader/listener?

when there is no e-bodylangauge

2009-01-03T12:27:00.004Z

i watched the royal institute christmas lectures this week and last night Prof Chris Bishop was talking about how even the most powerful computers have difficulty in pattern recognition.
He demo'd this with a nice practical example using photos of cats and dogs; proving that a 3 year old will manage easily to determine from a photo whether it's a picture of a cat or a dog but a computer struggles to do this task well.
I mention this because its clear that when we process things there's a lot going on that's not all obvious. We're running through examples, comparing, analysing etc etc.
This is also pertinent to how we communicate online, we are comparing what we read, hear, see to countless remembered things, maybe hearing a slight difference in tone in the voice or a different choice of words or change of style in writing.
So when a machine answers a mail you have sent to a customer service centre with an automated/automatic response - you know! Of course its humans who have written the wording in the first place, but... the machines just cannot use or apply it in the same way a human can. With a machine there is no e-bodylanguage.

smlirting

2008-08-30T13:30:00.005+01:00

the sms that came [gr8t catch u soon x]

well the (nearly 100% rhetorical) conversation went something like this:

"he put a x - that's good right? - he didn't need to put a 'x'... men don't put 'x's' do they unless they mean you to take them as a sign of interest?"

"so what shall i write back? - do i write back straight away or should i wait an hour or so? I don't want to look too keen - that will put him off right?"

"if i wait too long i will have to think of something to ask him - won't I? I better write something now or my opportunity will be lost. Do i put an 'x' too? maybe i should put 2 so that it looks positive eh?"

hardly different from the - "did he just give me a look" conversations shared in bars.

The timing can be critical too - too many sms too quick and she reports 'he's too keen'. But no messages can mean, no action = no fun = no chance.

There are rules, but they're like street rules - and like street language - specific to the context of the particular group.

Where the rules get broken its interesting! A common example of this is the 2am one too many drinks message - we've all either written it or received it! do i need to explain further? There should be some sort of breathalyser or timer on our phones to prevent messages being sent once we're over the limit or if its between 2am and 5am!

ping pong

2008-08-26T15:03:00.005+01:00

Whether your personal chat app of choice is instant messenger, sms on your phone, blackberry IM, google chat, skype chat or just email. I'm sure you've all experienced at one point or another that rapid exchange of messages. All grammar and rules of formality are abandoned and communication is honed to only its critical skeleton. These days this is just as likely to happen in a work setting as a private one.

In these sorts of 'ping pong' scenarios the virtual becomes a sort of hyper-reality because the messages are 'just in time' in the same way that a real-time conversation is. Just like the recorded pub conversation the messages out of the context of time would probably be rendered meaningless too. (You really had to be there to get it!)

In real-world exchanges of this nature there's lots of body language like eye contact, smiles, grins, frowns, grimaces, nods, head shakes etc accompanied by lots of non dictionary words and its actually not different in the virtual. Smileys and such like taking the place of nods,head shakes, frowns etc and lots of made up exclamations appear here too - eeek!, arrh, oooo, oxo, xxx, gr8t, ***!

So why is this of interest to those who would like to master the beast of virtual communication?

1) acknowledge its existence and importance - fast & free exchanges like this are the elastic which can shrink virtual distance.

2) responding out of kind to these types of communications can alienate in the same way that using this style of communication inappropriately might also do

3) Understanding the rules and who has ownership of the start & end.

more later....

Being right is sometimes wrong

2008-08-03T16:43:00.007+01:00

I hate smilies but... without them or something else, the short functional email can be misread as curt, harsh, even rude. For example, you write a long email explaining your reasoning on a critical business decision, expecting some reasoned comeback, argument, whatever. If the recipient just writes back 'No' - how would you respond to that? In real life - the response might have been delivered with an apologetic grin, a tilt of the head to ensure no bad feeling. In the email though all of this is missing.
Consider the different effects of different ways of saying the same thing:
Nah
nope :(
NO!!
No!
No :(
No - sorry
No :)
so sorry - the answer has to be no.

So in contrast to real life where our words & phrasing can be less than perfect because they are delivered along with all sorts of other non-verbal signals; in virtual communications, the sender needs to take a greater ownership of how the message might be received/percieved at the other end, to minimise any unintended reactions.

Visible vs Invisible

2008-04-07T15:51:00.006+01:00

An obvious broad categorization of e-bodylanguage is distinguishing between that which we can see and that which we can't.

Obvious visibles are the likes of USING CAPITAL LETTERS which is the online equivalent of shouting, using *&$&*! to indicate emotion (expletives) and emoticons for expressions :) :(
Less obvious visibles are the use of language, timing and sign offs.

To understand the effect that timing has, consider the scenario:

you invite a friend to dinner tomorrow and they respond in one of these 4 ways:
1) they respond immediately with YES
2) they respond after a few hours with YES
3) they respond 20 mins before the dinner with YES
4) they respond 1 week later (too late for the dinner) with YES

your (emotional) reaction to their response is likely to be different in all 4 circumstances - their context, their relationship with you will have been challenged in 3 out of the 4 probably. Timing may or may not have been 'deliberate' at the other end but it will certainly have had an impact on the receiver in one way or another.

Something on invisibles in my next posting

What is e-bodylanguage?

2008-04-02T18:31:00.005+01:00

I was working on a homework chat site, a child came in and managed to rile me in under 1min. He said nothing offensive and was asking a genuine question. So why had my response been so strong? There was definitely something going on besides the text!

I started using the term e-bodylanguage to describe this, because body language seemed to be the most comparable framework to hang this virtual experience on; in that, some of it is subtle (like pupil dilation) and some of it is in your face (like an angry frown)!

Since then I've been try to tease out from my online life, descriptions of what e-body language is and I'll be posting the findings on this site. But why? because understanding is useful - know whats happening you can work around it, work with it, use it!

Jude :) http://www.judeclark.com/