Talk to the hand…

By the time you find yourself writing in a text or tweet “what I meant was”, then the communications battle is already over. Too soon, in the fast-paced world of tweet and text conversation, the moment is lost and things have moved on. The trouble is, as human beings we communicate through words, obviously, but also through tone:

A friend of mine used to say that her cooking tasted lousy if it was not ‘cooked with love’. The best ingredients and the right cooking times could still produce really unappetising food if not combined in the right frame of mind. The same could be said of many acts of communication – the words are right and the facts are sound, but the tone is all wrong. A bit like my friend’s occasional loveless cooking, it may be insipid at best and indigestible at worst. An understanding of communication which is based purely on words is bound to be inadequate, for it tells less than half the story. We must look to how the words are said and the way that they sound to the hearer. Tone can make all the difference between winning a hearer over and turning him away. (Who Needs Words)

Word-based media, such as Twitter and SMS, have flattened the normally undulating landscape of conversation and turned it into a featureless plain of data. Like an Arctic explorer overwhelmed with snow-blindness, where sky, near ground and distant horizon all become as one – we find ourselves often disorientated. How can I tell whether your tongue is inserted in your cheek when you have only 140 characters with which to occupy it? Not only that, but the replacement of some of those characters with 🙂 or :0 or 🙁 may worsen, rather than improve the conversation.

In the end I know what you mean when I know you. This means that long term investment in conversations on a medium like Twitter are the things which allow me to discern your tone and to pick out the features of our conversational landscape. If I know you, then I probably know when you are being ironic and I will readily forgive an off day when a problem sounds like a moan and excitement sounds like boasting. Tuning my ear to your tone, like tuning into a foreign tongue, takes time.

Thirty five (eek!) years ago, Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind showed the gulf between galaxies bridged by just five tones (see below). How do you ensure the tonal quality of your Twitter conversation? Comments welcome.