At the end of the nineties, SMS and internet chats such as AIM and ICQ completely changed the ways in which people could talk to each other. As someone who always disliked talking to people over phone, I happily welcomed our new communication overlords and never looked back. I’m still preferring text to voice to this day, and it takes me weeks to respond to voice messages.

Thus said, it took me a good five years or so to understand an important difference between speaking in person and speaking in text. Which is that we signal a lot of emotions non-verbally. Duh, right? Nevertheless, I can’t count all the times I said something as a joke that the other party understood seriously. I think it’s mostly those situations that are to blame for my current generous use of emojis in texting 😛  The opposite happened many times too: I misread someone’s hints, missed the point someone was trying to make, imagined someone as feeling very differently from the way they actually were feeling. I’m also coming from a high-context culture, where emotions are expressed more explicitly and there’s less of a habit to second-guess someone’s real message through the veil of customary politeness. So initially I didn’t even try to read into the potential difference between what was sent and what I perceived.

When I read raw text where no explicit emotional context is explained, I imagine all the missing emotions myself. Their variety is usually limited by my current emotional state at the moment of reading and my available emotional spectrum in general. Being sad, angry, happy or tired when reading could make any message look similary emotionally colored to me. Knowing that this process happens automatically enables me to detach myself from emotional recognition before replying and ask myself: “is that actually my own emotion that I’m trying to attach to someone else’s message?”

I think this loss of emotional component in the textual communication is partially why online discussions might seem more threatening than talking to the same people in person. A smile, a gesture, a wink, almost imperceptible body movement, slight turn of the head — all of these factor into how we perceive the speaker. With no context to base our assumptions on, we might assume the worst intent to protect ourselves. And then even retaliate to non-existing threat, thus nudging the conversation to spiral down into open hostility. Just being aware that text is only a black-and-white depiction of someone’s originally colorful message could save a lot of unnecessary worries and help to avoid unnecessary confrontation.

Sadly, intentional verbal attacks are also not that uncommon, especially between people who don’t know each other very well or even at all. Hate feels good. When there’s no established relationship, then participants also won’t be extra careful not to ruin it. But some of these attacks are defensive in nature: someone expects me to reply aggressively, so they preemptively position themselves in the attacking position. Such expectations are often based on previous interactions. When you feel that everyone you are talking to replies angrily, then you could be inclined to come out to the anticipated verbal battle as fully armed.

Because it’s often difficult to understand the emotions behind the text messages, people have started employing various techniques to signal their feelings: periods, letter repetition, nasty CAPS. This helps to get closer to the emotional state of the sender, but I would argue that it’s still very far away from direct in-person conversation. It’s just the nature of it: we can’t always transmit emotions, jokes, irony and so on very well with pure text. I think even just being aware of this helps to clarify possible misunderstandings before acting on incomplete picture.

That’s not to say that I’m looking at every single message I read on the Internet as well-intentioned. I disagree with the idea that we all should “assume good intent” in every case, which is a commonly evangelized cultural norm in the modern workplace. This norm doesn’t work well when someone is being routinely mistreated and is forced to think that people are always doing their best. Rather, I choose to not assume intent at all. To avoid projecting from my own guesses when I feel strong emotional response to someone’s message, I prefer to explicitly ask them to verbally express their thoughts. If they actually do go an extra mile to make themselves correctly understood by me, I treat that as a sign of genuine respect 🤗

On my end, I try to always keep in mind that no matter what I’m writing, it will be perceived differently from how I perceive it myself. Both in terms of word meaning and emotionally. Be it a text message, a comment, an email or an article, part of the initial intent and emotional charge will always be lost. Between the two extremes of not writing anything at all or ignoring the unavoidable misperception and just outpouring my stream of consciousness, I usually try to walk the line of acting with awareness. The bottom line is that I want to learn from others, to be understood myself and I don’t intend to hurt anyone with my words.