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"A General Failure in Tone Indicators"

Some American made a video on Balkan history which flipped between saying that the Balkans has many cultures, then mentioned some war or similar catastrophe, then went on repeat. The video asserted bluntly (if not explicitly) that multiple cultures coexisting created all the strife in the Balkans.

I commented:

It looks like multiple cultures together create war. This must be why the United Kingdom has never had any fights, either inside, or outside its borders.

Now you, my charitable reader, probably understood the sarcasm, but definitely did not hear any tone, because I didn’t make any tone; I’m writing words down. However, the poor reaction, with a ‘tone’ of ‘um, actually…’, suggested no sarcasm had been detected.

So I think it’s syllogistically safe to conclude that tone does play a vital role here. Charity of interpretation makes the difference.

Of course, making some internet sarcasm pointer (\s) clarifies the point, but it doesn’t do so by adding a tone - in fact many readers might not imagine any particular tone. It simply specifies ‘this is sarcasm’.

Just Write Better

I also want to object to the notion that people just need to write better, if their point may be understood. That tactic worked up to a point. It worked when people were speaking loudly in a bar, and could have been understood to endorse the Irish famine (even if their friends understood the implied sarcasm). It worked when writing in newspapers for a literate audience in the UK, in the 1980’s.

However, by the time news presenters spoke on television after the 2000’s, the demands of ‘write better, speak clearly’ had pushed normal communication into an unnatural contortion; and I mean that semi-literally. If you were sitting in a bar, and a friend began suddenly speaking like a news reader, you would look around for what’s causing this ghoulish way of speaking. Are they paranoid about someone listening and misinterpreting them? Are they having a sudden stroke? Have they been spiked?

Now the internet era has pushed people beyond all possibility of neutral discourse. Someone comments about a hairstyle in a snippet of a cartoon, then 3,000 comments later we end with an unwelcome monologue about Communism.

Friends, not Context

We all know that words’ meaning depends on the words around them. The word ‘peg’ might refer doing the laundry or anal sex. The word ‘DM’ basically means about as much as ‘00100110’ when wandering alone. But it’s less acknowledged that entire sentences, blog-posts or books can change meaning depending on the listener.

I can’t accept the standard explanation of ‘context’. Besides being horribly nebulous, people commenting on videos are in the context of the video. Any given misinterpretation - once you stop to list what might count - has all the context you can shake a stick at.

What all these misinterpretations hold in common is a lack of charity and shared experience - precisely the thing we receive from friends.

Solutions: IDK, Mastodon?

Despite its long-armed, viral nature, the internet does not innately join everyone together. ‘Connecting people’ is the fault of American corporations, not the internet. Rather, the internet connects people who already have shared experience, at very low cost. It lets people who grow petunias send messages, and they should manage communication just fine.

And if we imagine one of those people suddenly having to e-mail a random cross-word enthusiast (for whatever reason), they would normally seem ‘stiff’, and speak like a news-reader. This seems weird, but works very well - neither share any history, so the neutral language no longer looks unnatural. It works well for foreign correspondence, and we can all manage foreign correspondence once in a while. We don’t manage it well in the long-term, and none of us want to, but most of us can reach abroad (in the sense of a foreign country, or a specialist bulletin-board) well enough.

The standard communities we once built functioned with a clumsy parallel to real communities. Everyone joined because they knew someone inside, and with enough effort, one could normally finger whomever allowed someone to join the space. Everyone knew what was what (or got told to ‘lurk more’) before joining.