4 May 2016
Today’s prompt: It’s a text, text, text world! How do you communicate differently online than in person, if at all? How do you communicate emotion and intent in a purely written medium?
This prompt is actually kind of hilarious to me because over the years, my communication online has slowly crept into how I communicate in person too.
I’m not going to lie, I use short forms, hashtags, and all that other random crap in my texts or when I’m messaging friends online. However, that text speak has somehow infiltrated my talk in real life. I actually say hashtag in real life and then say whatever I would have hashtagged in a tweet. For instance, when talking with friends, I’ll actually say ‘hashtag nerdlife’ in conversation. I don’t really know how it happened, but it has. It’s one of those things that you start doing ironically to be funny, but then somehow just becomes something you say canonically.
When I’m using a written medium, say text or messaging, it’s sometimes hard to get the emotion correct. I’m a very sarcastic person, and I find that it doesn’t always come across correctly in text.
However, people who know me very well probably always get the gist of what I’m trying to say.