How is Character in Characters relevant? Why is it an important topic? Straight out of the news and a psychological study at Binghamton University insight in to a growing problem on our horizon…
Associate professor Celia Klin, associate dean of psychology at Binghamton University lead a study canvasing 126 undergraduate students on their perceived understanding of different sampled messages conveyed on different media from handwritten to digital texting. In her research she relays to Eureka Alert,
“Texting is lacking many of the social cues used in actual face-to-face conversations. When speaking, people easily convey social and emotional information with eye gaze, facial expressions, tone of voice, pauses, and so on. People obviously can’t use these mechanisms when they are texting. Thus, it makes sense that texters rely on what they have available to them — emoticons, deliberate misspellings that mimic speech sounds and, according to our data, punctuation. Punctuation is used and understood by texters to convey emotions and other social and pragmatic information. Given that people are wonderfully adept at communicating complex and nuanced information in conversations, it’s not surprising that as texting evolves, people are finding ways to convey the same types of information in their texts.”1
As we search for a way in this digital age to communicate, narrative text and personal digital communication has no context to convey emotions. People are grasping at cutsie symbols, acronyms, and yes punctuation to enhance their narrative and express feelings since the typography is confined to content only standardized letters, a one size fits all lettering system. Without an ability to customize the graphic to fit the person, moment, or emotions; we invite limitless linguistic creativity. This can be a great discovery, a new frontier for culture and language but there will be ideas that may undermine the fabric of our society. Reassigning punctuations’ meaning and re-inventing traditional linguistics to fit today’s technologies has to be done with care and consideration. Some punctuation is built to show emotion, for example the exclamation point is built for emphasis to display ideas of rage, surprise, or an intensity of response. However, in today’s digital climate where the Oxford comma is a punch-line, people are only using a period when texting to show an insincere statement, sarcasm, or anger. Which means the formal etiquette of our written language is being cast aside. They are gaining some emotion but losing a basic function of language, for what enticement: a faster message dispersal because you do not have to form a complete thought when communicating you need only hijack a punctuation mark. The desire to convey more than what our prefabricated homogenized selection of repetitive, uniform characters can carry is real. Our characters do lack character and need a crutch. This highlights the degenerative affect digital technology is playing on today’s linguistics. In many countries there has been a struggle to maintain cultural identity in language by fighting the digital technology effect of not taking the extra time to place accent marks when texting because it slows down the message. The problem is urgent as the general acceptance is of any trend leads to public acceptance. We need to not sit by and banally accept a butchering of our language for the sake of easy communication but rather come up with meaningful solutions working with maturing digital technology. New innovative technologies can give wings to innovating and re-inventing communication. Be the spark that ignites a new trend by adding context back and re-energizing the content.
See the article in its entirety here…
‘Texting insincerely: the role of the period in text messaging” published Nov. 22, 2015 in Computers in Human Behavior.
or a recent article highlighting Klin’s findings in Eureka Alert: Science News Source…
Study: Text messages that end in a period seen as less sincere
1 Klin, Celia. “Texting insincerely: the role of the period in text messaging” Eureka Alert: Science News Source. 8 December 2015. Online.