Here is a screenshot of a group chat between friends. This is actually the mobile version of Facebook, which means you can message people when on the go. Another affordance of Facebook messaging is, as you can see from the lovely whale, the ability to send photos to the other people in the group chat. If you are using it on your mobile you are able to take a photo instantly from your phone, which could come in handy if you want to send pictures quickly. However there are many constraints when using an online messaging service, for example; you don't actually know the tone of voice of the person who is speaking. This can become difficult if you have mis-read a message and perhaps continue to irritate the person you are messaging. For example, here Lucy has said "Awww, so cute!". Now, obviously her friends know her well enough to be sending her pictures of whales, but you could (if in a rather 'whale hating' mood) think she is being sarcastic. You don't know if she thinks this whale is cute. That is a slightly ridiculous example but perhaps in a more serious context, say if the 'boss' is messaging you, mis-reading their messages would be rather un-fortunate.
Context is indeed so important and your understanding of one another's personality and preferences plays so much part in accurate reading of tone which (although we perhaps get a great deal of exposure to one another's 'social media personas' so that we are aware of what the likely interpretation is). You are right that communication with those we are less intimately familiar with may have problematic misunderstandings because we don't adjust our communication style enough to take account of this. Do you have a 'social media idiolect'? This could be a type of sociolect but might be much more dependent on genre rather than audience (like sociolect is).
ReplyDelete