Tuesday, March 17, 2009

An 'Emotional' Message

I love living my life by moderation. If people ask how I am I might say 'good', 'bad', 'tired' or even 'where's the coffee'. It seems that that really covers my lifes feelings, wants and gives back about as much information as the asker requires or wants. And despite english stunting emotionally direct communications, the tone of my answer will give away more about my actual feelings than anything else.

The tone of all my answers is, in fact a highly relevant supporting the use of the wonders of sarcasm, the wit of irony and the humour of a movie like 'Wayne's World'. All these things that are then lost in the wonders of the net. And that comes at a point. If you think I'm serious with the first comment of this paragraph you can't hear the tone of my voice dripping with sarcasm. You may be waiting to see if I'll insert a winking emoticon to check I'm joking otherwise you could, possibly, watch a feed of my webcam as I gaze, glassy eyed, into the glowing box of a screen in front of me. I can't see much emotion being conveyed through 36 alphebetised characters plus punctuation or at intently gazing at a flickering screen while people watch me from a plastic egg.

So can we get past this barrier of only putting straight flat lines down on a screen with little to no emotion. Does a :) really convey that I have ambivalent feelings about my cat's employment choices or that :P will show my heightened disapproval of the business plan for the matchstick world builder set. So what options does this leave us, Maybe we can start to have a colour variations to indicate anger(red) sadness(blue), envy(green), shallow(pink), Peachy(peach) or even Pissed Off(Yellow). Personally I like to think that emotion is all about pressure and the keyboards, in all there innovativeness, should be able to the pressure your pounding into the keys. So if you're hammering nails into a concrete wall or lightly brushing a speck of dust on the keyboard the letters should change in size. Apparently, the chinese language, has five different tonal variations but the English could not have over 128 different points of pressure. It might make it a little harder to see the vary light touch people have when typing lightly but punch the keyboard and some letters should sit there for days.

But just to be clear I'm quite happy to see you all reading this. It's just annoying for you, the reader, that you can't tell if I'm sarcastic or not.

1 comment:

android said...

: P
(yes. it's a curious thing this language business. something like 93% of our communication is non-verbal. no wonder it's so damn hard to figure out what people mean online - we're missing 93% of the picture! ps your keyboard pressure idea really appeals. )