What we have here
posted in Frustration, Pop Culture |The explosion of the Internet has its glories–I found our first house on the Internet long before it was the normal way to look at houses, I pay my bills by Internet by preference, I book flights and hotels and learn about adoption via the Internet. I started out long ago on Usenet, following alt.callahans, then moving to misc.gettingmarried or whatever it was, then misc.pregnancy, then alt.infertility. And some email lists. Then I moved on to message boards. Then blogs.
(But not Twitter. Or miniblogs. Or other Web 2.0 social networks. I joined a few blogging networks, but haven’t really done much with them.)
All of which revealed to me that the written word has an amazing ability to be misconstrued.
Some people can write well. Some people can’t. Some people can read well. Some people can’t.
Writing blog posts, or bulletin board posts, or Usenet posts can be fraught with uncertainty: Sometimes what you write, meaning one thing, becomes read in a totally different manner. I’ve had this happen before, and wrote about it before, and when it happens, you become totally flabbergasted, appalled: But…but…that’s not what I said! Or: But…but…that’s how it reads, but that’s not what I meant!
So some people litter their posts with emoticons to ensure that their meaning is not misread. Or, occasionally, someone who has been misconstrued to the point where they feel they’re disliked, may start sprinkling lots of emoticons to the max, hoping–like a puppy dog wagging its tail–the readers will "read" see? see? I’m not being snarky or condescending! I’m making a joke! Laugh! Please! Please don’t take this the wrong way! Please don’t be angry at me! And then, people being people, maybe others will take the overdose of emoticons as a sneering reminder that They Don’t Read Things The Right Way, and take it as being condescending. Enough of this interaction, and the puppy-like emoticons morph into exactly what is being seen: an angry tirade, a way of saying: Damn you idiotic fuckers anyway, this is a joke but I know you’re not going to get it, so maybe if I put goddamned neon lights around it you’ll recognize it (though I doubt it).
Oy.
Long ago and far away, on a private board, someone wrote about her bad body image. How it affected her life. How miserable it made her. Lots of people wrote back, doing the womanly "Uh-hunh, I hear you, girl, I know what you mean!" Someone else wrote back about her bad body, how she was "ugly", and she used a phrase that I read as being written with a sort of rueful snort, a form of rolling her eyes at herself. Others in the discussion read it a totally different way–it was seen as a slam, a piece of spiteful cruelty. The disjunction between the two led to an all-out fight.
Oy.
I’ve seen it play out elsewhere: something that’s meant jokingly or ruefully or in a silly way gets taken seriously. Someone saying idly "Lordy, I wish (insert President’s name here) were dead" gets turned into an investigation from the FBI into a death threat.
Oh, it happens in real life, too. Miscommunications abound. A guy says to his wife "Yeah, I look at those girls’ tushies and boobs and want to mess around with them", thinking he’s just being honest and open, and she decides it means he’s having a mid-life crisis and is about to leave her. Or a college girl’s parents tell her, after she announces she’s getting an apartment of her own, "How are you going to pay for all that?!" (meaning pay for an apartment while she’s attending college) and she hears "How are you going to pay for an apartment AND COLLEGE?!" (meaning pay for everything, since she’s obviously about to go out on her own and that means she’s not going to have college paid for anymore) and immediately drops out of college.
But it’s a lot harder to have things totally misconstrued when you’re talking in person. There are physical cues: lifted eyebrows, shrugs, blushes, rolling eyes, a V-8 whap against the head. There are a million different non-verbal cues in person to let someone know you sympathize, you’re joking, you’re being serious, you’re angry, you’re bored. We’re hard-wired to learn all these cues from childhood. When they go missing–on paper or on a computer screen–we’re left with only our own extrapolations to fill in the blanks.
Maybe my extrapolations are the ones out of whack. Maybe where I saw the puppy-dog trying to wiggle its way back into the graces of friends, I was wrong. Maybe when I "heard" the rueful snort, I was wrong. Maybe all those other people were right. I’ll never know.
(For the record, this has nothing to do with any bloggy blow-ups that have happened recently or in the past.)
Onto other things: Anocat wanted to know what "that pink thing" was. It’s called "Pinkie Pie’s Balloon House™, a three-level My Pretty Pony extravaganza of small unnecessary plastic items that garnered awestruck indrawn breaths from almost every girl at the party. Noreen wanted to know how many attended: There were four girls and one boy who showed up, plus a small sibling who was supposed to be outside in the general play area but who hung around the glass door with such a sorrowful face, sobbing, "Sissy! Sissy!" that we let her in, too.
