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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 didnât make any tone; Iâm writing words down. However, the poor reaction, with a âtoneâ of âum, actuallyâŚâ, suggested no sarcasm had been detected.
So I think itâs 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 doesnât do so by adding a tone - in fact many readers might not imagine any particular tone. It simply specifies âthis is sarcasmâ.
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 1980âs.
However, by the time news presenters spoke on television after the 2000âs, the demands of âwrite better, speak clearlyâ 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 whatâs 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.
We all know that wordsâ meaning depends on the words around them. The word âpegâ might refer doing the laundry or anal sex. The word âDMâ basically means about as much as â00100110â when wandering alone. But itâs less acknowledged that entire sentences, blog-posts or books can change meaning depending on the listener.
I canât accept the standard explanation of âcontextâ. 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.
Despite its long-armed, viral nature, the internet does not innately join everyone together. âConnecting peopleâ 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 âstiffâ, 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 donât 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 âlurk moreâ) before joining.