emotional exchange on the internet

[piranha]

from a discussion elsejournal comes this statement:

"The Internet is uniquely un-suited to emotional content."

agree, or disagree? why?

discuss if you would be so kind.

[crossposted to LJ/DW, comments welcome in both places.]

Comments

[sara]

*frowns* I dunno, I have a lot of emotional content on the internet. And the first time I fell in love was on a proto-internet. So, um, I'm going to vote for, "No, that may be a sign you're doing it wrong."

[rho]

Disagree, but with the caveat that I think it depends a lot on the communication style of the person in question. If I'm discussing or explaining something that I know will be highly emotional for me, I find the Internet much better suited than any medium that involves me having to use my voice. When I'm emotional, my voice gets shaky and uncertain and generally can't be relied upon whereas I can still type coherently, concisely, and articulately.

[redbird]

Disagree, largely on the grounds that it's far too broad and thus vague. I am happily conducting two solid relationships with much help from the internet: we talk about all sorts of things on IM (mostly one partner) and email (mostly the other). I've made a lot of other connections via LJ and Usenet.

Email isn't a substitute for touch. Neither are paper letters. And neither, for me, is touch a substitute for words, spoken or written.

[azurelunatic]

Nor is the phone a substitute for touch. (Miss Lunatic is suffering through some long-distance friendship right now, and is inclined to be woeful.)

[torachan]

Disagree. All communication on the internet is better for me, emotional or not, but with stuff that upsets me, it is often enough to make me lose the shaky hold I had on verbal communication in the first place, whereas I can still type just fine.

Plus usually when people say stuff like the internet is not well-suited to communication what they mean is that it's not suited to their NT style of communication. They want eye contact and socially correct body language and perhaps touching, so it's always coming from a very neurotypical set of assumptions.

[serene]

Disagree, disagree, disagree. It's unsuited to emotional content from/by/with folks who are uncomfortable/unskilled/displeased with/at/by using text to discuss emotional content.

Some of the most important discussions, the deepest ones, and the most emotional ones, have happened in text, which these days usually means on the internet. Tell the Brownings that text can't convey emotion. Pft.

[serene]

"...and the most emotional ones in my life..."

[azurelunatic]

I disagree. It is not that the internet is inherently unsuited. Humans have been expressing emotion in text since writing was invented. Some humans are just inherently bad at expressing emotion in a text-only asynchronous environment.

[snippy]

Uniquely unsuited to *what* about emotional content?

It's a medium. It can be used skillfully or unskillfully. It has limitations and benefits, some that differ from those of other mediums and some that are shared.

I don't think it's uniquely anything. I don't think it's unsuited to emotional content.

And anyway, the Internet is a whole bunch of things: text and video and sound and still photos and art and communication and databases.

It's perfectly suited to the emotional content in my webcam chats with my grandson! There is no better medium for that, he is too young to write and less expressive on the phone, but when he can see me and hear me, he chatters and points and shows me his affection for me.

Re: emotional exchange on the internet

[eagle]

Disagree. It handles emotional content differently, particularly if they're talking about the current mostly-text environment rather than the emerging video environment. But that doesn't make it un-suited. It makes it different.

There are things I can process better in text, and things I can process better with more cues and bandwidth. It Depends (TM).

Re: emotional exchange on the internet

[ceri]

What he said.

Re: emotional exchange on the internet

[cesy]

Yes, this. It has pros and cons and they vary for different people. It is better for some types of emotional exchange and worse for others.

Re: emotional exchange on the internet

[aquaeri]

Yeah, that's about my take on it.

[firecat]

The Internet lets us discuss controversial subjects without the same risk of physical violence that f2f communication has. Therefore, controversial subjects may be discussed more often.

There are certainly special skills it is helpful to learn, if one is going to do a lot of emotional expression in ascii or HTML.

[deane]

I'm bothered by the word "uniquely" in there. It makes the meaning of the statement ambiguous:

1)	"There is no other medium whose unsuitability to emotional content is precisely the same as that of the Internet". Probably true, but not particularly meaningful.
2)	"The Internet is unique among media in being unsuited to emotional content". I would argue that spam carving is very poor at handling emotional content, so the Internet cannot be unique in that regard.
3)	"The Internet is the worst medium for presenting emotional content". Did you actually look at that spam carving page?
4)	The word "unique" is misleading filler which should be ignored, giving us "The Internet is un-suited to emotional content". I find this the most likely interpretation, and I disagree with it. Since the Internet is capable of carrying many other media — prose, poetry, voice, music, images, movies, etc — to say that "the Internet" is unsuited to emotional content is, by implication, to say that books, films and photographs are unsuited to emotional content. Either that or that a book (or film or photograph) somehow loses its capacity for communicating emotion when it is distributed over the Internet. In either case there are so many counter-examples that the statement is obviously untrue. Or at least it should be.

[trixtah]

Heh, let's close down DW/LJ and even Facebook right now, then. :-)

If we're talking about emotional communication, that's something else, but then again skilful emailing is just as good as writing a well-crafted letter. Or are they not "the Internet"?

I do agree airing emotional laundry (in terms of having public relationship disputes) online is tacky, but no more so than those people who insist on fighting in public, full stop.

I think the only possible response to this is:

[liv]

LOL!

That is to say, what a brilliant piece of witty pedantry, thank you.

[zxhrue]

disagree.

uniquely? huh? based on strictly text-based exchanges, the internet suffers no more or less than other forms of text based communication. even the immediacy of response afforded by chat/email/usenet that was/social networking fora of whatever flavor only serves to expose the skill or talent of the _correspondent_ in conveying emotional content. I can't speak to video based internet communications.

I miss letters. something about the feel of paper, and the knowledge that (generally speaking) significant time was invested in their content makes them seem more intimate to me. :shrug: the internet has only sped up the response time, and increased the rate at which feedback amplicfication can occur, either for good or ill.

"A good letter from a friend is a textbook of rhetorical possibilities; it is a skillful blend of styles (learned, colloquial, comic), tones (revelatory, admonitory, conciliatory) and subjects (books, meals, other friends). ...a mix of intimacy and aesthetics -- gossip in the form of a canzone, as it were."

David Kirby. 1995. "Glad-Handing Her Way Through the World," a
review of Marilyn Hacker. 1995. Selected Poems 1965-1990. and Do. Do.
Winter Numbers. NY: W.W. Norton & Co.

[wild_irises]

Basically disagree. The Internet (as someone upthread pointed out, in its current primarily-text form) has some significant and important issues with limited bandwidth, and is not ideal for transmitting tone accurately. It also operates at a speed which can encourage hastiness and lack of time to reconsider.

At the same time, there is far too much evidence of successful communication of emotional content on the Internet for a statement like the one you quote to be anywhere near true.

[flarenut]

What they said. But I might keep the "uniquely" part, just because the potential archivability and playback is something one otherwise only gets in epistolary romances, and the time for dong it by internet is so so much faster unless one lives in victorian london.

[crantz]

It certainly seems to encourage emotional reactions, is all I can really say.