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Communicating Subtleties Online
[Based on posts made on The 32-Bit Cafe]
I deeply enjoy brainstorming how to structure online communities to facilitate more peaceful communication together. For example, how do the features of a forum lead to more or less dialogue over time? How do they impact how messages are conveyed or interpreted (both intentionally and unintentionally)?
Enhancing Emoji Reactions & Extending Mood Indicators
On the one hand, emoji reactions are similar to "likes" in that they do not offer much more than a hint of what the giver might feel about a post and some who receive them might interpret them as a reflection of the importance of their work (e.g.: thinking to oneself, "Aw, my post doesn't have any replies or reactions. People must not have liked it."). If the author of that post attaches that perception to their sense of self-worth, then they might drop out of the conversation when they feel that their input is not valued, or they might treat that metric as something that they have to "game" (i.e.: tailoring their opinions to make the number of reactions rise in response, behavior skewing progressively more towards "attention seeking"). [As a brief aside, that seems to be true even in the context of spaces where there is no motive to "grift" or "influence". I feel that dynamic is a significant factor within any "purity spiral" or "echo chamber" both online and off...though many things within society tend to degrade into "popularity contests" when they are viewed as a "meritocracy".]
On the other hand, even a cursory glance at emojis shows how they can act as a kind of substitute for facial expressions, gestures, and body language, as well as convey more symbolic meanings through various "icons". In that sense, they can "humanize" an interaction where the participants are not visible to one another. Likewise, the tone of a text can be hard to determine by word choice alone, so they can also offer another signal to help us understand the intentions behind a message. How can that be enhanced further without losing the "safety" or "comfort" offered by the pseudonymity of many forums?
To explore a few ideas...
Usually, verbal messages are immediately accompanied by facial expressions. What if every reply of a forum required both an emoji reaction and a typed response? Or, what if instead of an emoji, it would need to be accompanied by a "mood" indicator that explicitly couples a facial expression emoji to an emotional descriptor?
One is capable of a wide range of emotions, but that does not necessarily mean that we need a huge list of emotions within the options to choose from when setting the mood indicator. They would just have to cover the general spectrum that humans tend to feel. This also gives a useful organizational scheme if the forum were to allow for more than one mood indicator to be used on the same reply in order to convey a mix of emotions.
This could allow for more nuance to be conveyed as one is often capable of feeling very different emotions simultaneously. How these mood indicators are presented within the post can also change what they can convey. For example, throughout a conversation, emotions naturally tend to shift depending upon what we are talking about. What if mood indicators could be used throughout a post to convey what is felt about different sections of text?
I imagine it working something like this, using this article as a rough example...
One can click on an emotion button adjacent to the text to see which part of the post the author highlighted with it, like the bottom-most section of text that is highlighted within the above image. This highlighting would indicate the "hopeful" emotion associated with that piece of text.
Tone is very tricky to convey through writing, but I think having tools like this could be helpful, especially within the context of an online community where people are sincerely trying to have constructive dialogues.
Sometimes a message is not the literal meaning of the words that are being used, but the emotions that one hopes to convey through them. And mere acknowledgement of that underlying emotion can do so much in diffusing tension and allowing dialogue to flourish.
Part of what I had hoped to achieve by designing these types of online forum features together was to help make it easier to understand the implications of a piece of text when a person is not visible. I find it exciting to think of the possibilities, how much more meaningful communication can be when we get a clearer picture of how we might be impacting one another.
