this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
213 points (88.4% liked)
Asklemmy
44189 readers
1195 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
While I get what you're saying and I think sometimes emojis can absolutely be overused or used in place of textual clarification, I feel they also serve as an effective substitute for a lack of non-verbal communication. Generally speaking, "what people say" is only half the story, and "how they say it" (the nuances of facial/bodily expressions, tone of voice, etc) is the other half.
When writing narratives, we get away from this by means of, well, narration. "... he said, cheerfully"; "... he replied, with just a twinge of annoyance to his voice"; "she said, while averting her eyes".
In first person communications like social media, we don't really have an effective way to communicate that sort of nuance. We do have action asterisks shudders in horror, shorthand expressions to represent actions like LOL, and emoji 🤷♂️ as potential alternatives, as well as some community-driven linguistic nuance like Reddit's usage of "/s" to indicate sarcasm.
We could also go all old-timey letter writing and say things like "while I find myself hesitant to reply to you in fear that you will consider it an attack, I do find myself with some concerns in regards to your comment and will elaborate below. I hope that you will not take these concerns as dismissive of your opinion in any way, as I simply mean to clarify some doubts and seek your own opinion on my thoughts as presented above." (This might be an example of "overly eloquent" and there is probably a happy medium.)
I find the ever-evolving linguistics of internet communication to be really fascinating, if you can't tell!
Absolutely, and it isn't to say I never use emoji/emoticons but I don't on social media that much. You can convey emotion and vibe with a bit of nuanced typing. This is likely lost on some folks but others seem to be tuned to it, almost like body language. Grammarly actually has a tone mapper built in to tell you what sort of tone you are sending out.
relevant xkcd
along those lines, I have also seen emojis being used as the modern equivalent of determinatives