The Complicated Language of Social Media
By Maxim Behar
An excerpt from my book Generation F.
Do a small test and write the same in an e-mail, text message, Facebook, Skype, or anywhere else you can think of. Use the same language — Bulgarian, English, or any other language you wish. You will quickly find that
EVERY MEDIUM REQUIRES ITS LANGUAGE
– with its rhythm, structure, and vocabulary. Let’s take Twitter, for example. With only 140 symbols, we must express what we used to have an entire newspaper column to convey.
The language we write in — because social media is mostly about writing — has changed a lot, and our biggest misunderstandings often stem from our being unaware of this.
It is well known that, in face-to-face communication, the words we use only carry 7% of the meaning. The other 93% are in our tone of voice and body language.
The tone of voice and body language is precisely what is missing from online communication, and this means that the entire burden of conveying the message falls to the text: its structure and length, the meaning of the words, the sentence dynamics… Something very important is the phrasing’s potential to cause ambiguity or confusion.
At least now, almost no one pays attention to this extremely important fact, and this neglect is at the root of most misunderstandings in online communication.
The fear that even the most positive message might leave room for misinterpretation is well-founded. It deserves our attention until social media relies exclusively on real-time video instead of written text. This time is certain to come sooner rather than later, but even then, online communication will have its special features, and we will have to learn a whole new set of visual techniques to communicate effectively.
Generation F is about social media and the world, the people who run the world and how they feel, and how we feel during our transformation from Homo Sapiens to Homo Socialicus.
