Why everyone wants to talk without words
Non-verbal communication is on the rise. Here’s what people are not saying — and why they’re not saying it.
The newest form of communication that I know of is “fake typing.”
Here’s how it works. When you’re typing a message to someone, apps tend to show what is called a “typing indicator.” As in: “Mike is typing…” In some apps, it’s three dots in a thought bubble.
But then they don’t send.
The reply is the other person typing without sending. Each person sees the typing indicator. And that’s the whole conversation.
The idea is to convey that “I’m thinking about you” or “hey.”
The trend started on Snapchat among flirting teenagers, then spread to other messaging platforms and other people for other purposes.
This spectacularly non-verbal communication is the latest in a long and growing number of ways to talk online without words.
It started with emoticons in the 80’s on CompuServe, or whatever, when people started using punctuation to indicate non-verbal reaction, like the smiley face and winkie face — :) and ;), respectively.
The rise of the web and smartphones enabled these to be mostly replaced by emoji or stickers, of which there are thousands and which can be automatically generated in messaging apps using emoticons.
Like buttons on Facebook (and the extended range of similar expressions, called “Reactions”) and hearts on Twitter are another way to respond without words.
On social media, an increasing number of comments to posts come in the form of animated GIFs.
The use of GIFs on social media come in two varieties — with words typed on the image, and without. Those without tend to be the facial expressions and gestures, often of celebrities from famous movies or TV appearances, which are presumably supposed to convey the reaction of the person posting them.
Surprisingly, this is heavily deployed during heated political exchanges on social media. Instead of addressing someone’s argument with a counter-argument, the response is a GIF of someone laughing or rolling their eyes.
Why don’t people use their words?
Here’s one clue: In the past few decades, a habit of inserting hedges and vagueness into speech emerged.
A few decades ago, someone might say “He went ballistic.” Nowadays they might say, “He sort of went ballistic.”
Even more common is the habit of inserting the word “like”: “He went, like, ballistic.”
The clear purpose of these hedge words is to be less clear.
We have grown hesitant to speak definitely. It’s as if making clear, unambiguous statements was hazardous or dangerous or socially fraught. It’s as if people are afraid of being caught saying the wrong thing or sounding stupid.
Plenty of people complain these days about woke cancel-culture policing of speech and the heavy consequences of blurting out the wrong thing online. It can be a problem for celebrities, but not for most people.
I believe there’s a small-scale, personal and social version of that driving both vague speech and non-verbal communication, to some extent at least.
It may be driven by an intuition that, in the digital age, words are forever. Your words, and also people on social media who criticize your words.
Words have bigger consequences now. So people avoid them. It’s safer to build escape clauses into your communication.
But I think the biggest driver of non-verbal expression is that our brains are maxed out with words. We read too many. And we write too many. The internet has us talking way too much to way too many people way too often (an idea explored in this Atlantic article, “People Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much.”)
Most of us these days are typing and texting and retweeting and commenting all day long. We fill the silence with two-hour podcasts, one after the other.
A kind of word fatigue sets in, and people often respond by just choosing their expression off a menu of emojis or GIFs.
It feels lazy. But it’s not.
Typing without sending. Emoji. GIFs. That’s just us maxing out on how many words our brains can process each day.
We should probably take that as a hint that we need fewer words in our lives. Specifically, cut the endless and mindless social conversations, and instead give our attention to fewer but better verbal communications.
Just a thought. What do you think? Drop me a GIF and let me know.
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