Half-Joke's On You?
Amused person sticking their tongue out; picture from (gasp) Pexels
Note: Before I begin, I want to give a quick housekeeping update! I was able to fix an annoying feature that only allowed you to leave comments if you signed in with a Blogger account. It was actually embarrassingly easy to fix - I just had to go to Settings and click a button. You SHOULD be able to comment now whether or not you have a Blogger account (or a Google account, for that matter), but let me know if something's glitching!
I also attempted to set up an email notification system for each time a new post comes out, but after hours of tinkering with RSS feeds, I'm giving up for now. If you know a better way, I'd love to hear it!
This jan Misali video has been circulating on many of my Discord servers recently, despite technically not being "viral" if you look at the pure view count.
As you may have guessed by the fact that I'm writing a blog post on it, I have a lot of thoughts about the topic of tone indicators.
I suppose I should begin with this disclaimer: Tone indicators are widely used in part to make it easier for neurodivergent people to understand tone online. I am not neurodivergent, nor do I pretend to be. This post represents my current thoughts on the subject of tone indicators, but I won't be analyzing the effectiveness of tone indicators for accessibility. I don't have the personal experience necessary to either affirm or refute it, so I'll trust the general consensus that tone indicators do help clarify tone for neurodivergent people.
I do use tone indicators, mostly for the sake of clarifying tone in the broadest sense. If you've talked to me at all over text or some similar means, you probably know that I talk... very grammatically. You know: punctuation, capitalization, few texting acronyms, etc. Sometimes, though, my intent behind a message can get obfuscated by the little dot at the end, and the entire tone can change. Maybe I sound rigid and formal, or maybe I sound unfriendly. Maybe I try to express sarcasm but the grammar makes it seem like I actually mean what I said. Whatever the case, I find tone indicators helpful to clarify my intent and give people a sense of what I'm actually trying to express. "/j" (joking), "/lh" (lighthearted), "/s" (sarcastic), and "/gen" (genuine) are the ones I most commonly use.*
*One common objection is that a lot of people don't know tone indicators. This is a valid concern, and part of the reason why I only use tone indicators with people of a certain age range. However, there are plenty of tone indicator lists online, so I don't think it's that big of a problem. jan Misali brings up a good point that people can always just type out the whole tone instead of an abbreviation; I can agree with that, but the entire format of texting revolves around abbreviations, so I'm also not that surprised that tone clarification has taken the same route.
However, there is a solid line to be drawn between using tone indicators to reduce ambiguity and using tone indicators as a substitute for conversation. Tone indicators are great if you want to express a general emotional idea, like "joke", "not mad", "a little upset", or "in a positive way". This is great if you just want to clarify that it's NOT something else, but tone indicators are limited in that they can't express the extent to which something IS. Attempts at expressing degrees of a feeling, like "/hj" (half-joking), "/lu" (a little upset), and possibly "/hyp" (hyperbole) can show that the feeling is somewhere in between, but don't tell you exactly where in between. (jan Misali uses this reasoning for part of why "/hj" is a bad tone indicator, and I agree with him.)
People texting; I am increasingly starting to think Pexels > Unsplash
I also find it problematic that tone indicators, though less likely to be misinterpreted, can sometimes... defeat the point of conversations? The reason humans have conversations at all is to express detail and emotions on top of whatever information is being exchanged. The beauty of conversations isn't always in the information being passed, but in the connection that it creates between people. It's the difference between something like "Work sucked today and I'm feeling kind of sad right now" being passively absorbed as information and exchanged for related information, versus something like "Work sucked today and I'm feeling kind of sad right now" leading to a genuine conversation that can make a person feel better, even if that conversation isn't related to what the person is experiencing.
The beauty of conversations isn't always in the information being passed, but in the connection that it creates between people.
Treating conversations purely as informational transactions strips away the emotional aspect. Also, emotions tend to be complexly intense and complexly mixed with other emotions. To reduce that to a simple "mad" or "not mad" is excessively simplistic.
Obviously, the point of tone indicators is to provide accessibility and improve understanding of conversations over text, a medium without a lot of features. This should absolutely be the priority in social situations that are more geared toward exchanging information, as well as in conversations where people involved could benefit from the clarity. Tone indicators are also valuable in situations where the tone is likely to be misinterpreted.
Tone indicators should not, however, be mistaken for a perfect substitute all of the time. There is simply too much diversity in expression and emotion for that to be the case.
I think one of the reasons "/hj", which is the focus of jan Misali's video, has become so popular is that people want some kind of middle ground between a joke and a truth. If something isn't caustic enough to be sarcasm, true enough to be truth, or false enough to be a joke, but the underlying sentiments are too joke-y for it to be an exaggeration, what tone indicator can express that? If something is too true to be a joke but is expressed in a joke-y manner, what does that make it?
So sure, I agree that the "/hj" tone indicator is inherently contradictory, but at its heart its popularity seems like a natural effect of people simply wanting to express themselves better through the limited emotional lexicon of tone indicators.
Tone indicators are, after all, a great way to improve accessibility, lessen confusion, and cut down on ambiguous situations, but they simply aren't equipped to handle the entire emotional range(s).
~ Coruscant
P.S. Beware of pranksters today, unless you want to end up like this guy.
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