Have you ever been in a situation where you’re text messaging someone (chatting) and the person doesn’t use any form of emojis to convey their emotions?, just stone cold text. You have a hard time figuring out what the person is thinking. Was the last sentence he typed was sarcastic, is he/she angry, sad, bored, excited or exhausted of speaking to you?
How easy it is to determine these emotions and feelings about someone when we’re talking to them face to face. The cues we get from eyes, posture, body language gives us a sense of understanding about their experience speaking to us. We find it easy to determine what the other person is thinking at the very specific moment as we speak and so we can formulate further interaction accordingly.
You might have also noticed people would behave differently or act in a certain way when they’re chatting and become completely different personality when you meet them. For instance, a person might open more while speaking to you through text while feeling shy to express things when you meet in person.
Let’s dig at another relatable phenomenon, have you ever noticed when you really like someone, let’s say, a great singer, you start living and acting like them? You’d wear their band tshirts, behave like them, change your lingo to sound like them, walk like them if you’re a crazy die hard fan. Same goes for our loved ones, we usually pick things up that we like and start using those in our daily life. For instance, if your partner pronounces something in a cute way that you like too (Cringe alert lol) you’d start to pronounce it in the same way because you find it appealing.
Widely, want I want to articulate with the above three topics is first ‘absence of body language/physical cues’, ‘social anxiety and relationships’ and ‘bonding’.
I feel after the boom of social media and text messaging, we’ve moved away from personal interactions and emotional communication. There’s a disconnection between the sender and receiver with a mere fact of emotion and because of that reason, people go heavy on emojis to convey there messages. No emoji = No emotion.
This also gives birth to social anxiety for good and bad. Good because if you get chills speaking to people in person, you can use your comfort zone for interaction through a social media platform or a messaging app, but at the same time, it creates a positive feed back loop for your anxiety that kicks in when you take it to base 3 to go out to speak to someone in person.
Because of digitalization in communication, we can’t retain micro things about people which we can use for our own benefit and chaos, for that specific reason, the development and personal improvement could come to halt. This eventually means misunderstandings, sugar coating emotions, breakouts and catastrophe. In other words, bonding that could be achieved if we socialize more is hard to achieve if we use digital communication.
Time to dig into it deeper.
Artwork: https://dribbble.com/shots/15062311-SMILE
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