We all struggle to communicate on the internet. Now, young people are leading a sincere effort to clear things up.
Written language is an imperfect method for the messy, complex business of communication, where facial expressions, gestures and vocal tones transmit oceans of meaning and subtext — for those, at least, who can read them.
Words themselves offer none of that: In a famous study, Albert Mehrabian, a psychology professor at U.C.L.A., found that humans tend to perceive only a fragment of a speaker’s meaning through spoken words. Instead, he observed, most meaning is gleaned from body language and tone of voice.
In a text-only environment, how can we ever be certain other people understand what we mean when we post online? Enter tone indicators.
Words Can Mean Lots of Things
Tone indicators are paralinguistic signifiers used at the ends of statements to help readers fill in the blanks.
Put simply, they are written shorthand for the poster’s intent and emotion. One might use “/srs,” short for “serious,” to express sincere affection for a pop culture crush.
On Twitter, users often encounter fragments of text stripped of context by the algorithmic maelstrom, requiring readers to interpret the tone of statements like “Harry Styles could run me over with a bus and I’d say thank you.”
Interpreting text can be frustrating for anyone online, but is particularly so for users who are neurodivergent — a wide category that can refer to people with a range of neurological differences including autism spectrum disorder and dyslexia. Some neurodivergent people say they have trouble deciphering the subtle cues associated with sarcasm or flirtation, in particular, and are tone-indicator enthusiasts.
This year, ideas and arguments about tone indicators have generated sprawling and passionate conversation online. Some people find them absurd, while others fiercely evangelize their importance. This is a dynamic common with emerging linguistic trends tied to accessibility and vulnerability (trigger warnings, for example, and sharing of pronouns). Even among supporters, there is broad debate about what their scope ought to be.
Tone indicators are most popular within some Twitter and Tumblr communities of young people with overlapping interests in identity representation, anime and K-pop fandom, twee aesthetics, and sensitivity toward mental health and gender issues. It’s a milieu where inclusivity is considered a paramount virtue. These people use and like tone indicators because they want to help others have better experiences online.
In recent weeks, several users have posted lists containing dozens of tone indicators ranging from “/j = joking” to “/lh = lighthearted” and “/nsx = nonsexual intent.”
“Tone indicators are literally used to indicate the tone of what you write, since written conversation can be harder to get by people who have communication issues or just aren’t used to a certain way someone speaks online,” wrote Michael Guazzelli, who is 21 and identifies as neurodivergent, in a direct message on Twitter. “There’s plenty of different typing styles and if someone is not familiar to someone else’s, the tone indicators make everything more simple because no one has to ask what the person is talking about or what they mean with what they said.”
“It’s like, you say you hate a friend of yours, but of course you don’t — someone may misunderstand that though, so to avoid that you put /j to indicate that you wanted to make a joke,” he continued. “Or, if you actually ended your friendship with said person, you would like to use /srs (serious) so people know something is actually up and you are not playing around about the topic.”
He explained that while indicators are “mostly used by neurodivergent people,” they have been “spreading to all people who find them useful or just want to be clear and help nd people understand things (which is most appreciated by us!)”
Making Social Media a Better Place
Today’s tone indicators go a step further than, say, putting a winky-face emoji at the end of a sentence. They assign a narrow, concrete meaning to a statement, leaving no room for interpretation. They are not subtle and can deflate humor. (Picture a comedian declaring to an audience “I am joking” after saying something outrageous.)
But what tone indicators lack in artfulness, they make up for in their bulletproof inability to be misinterpreted. In complicated conversations, that goes a long way.
The growing lexicon of tone indicators, beyond helping people understand what’s sincere or what’s flirty, can feel, to the uninitiated, like another language. And at their most complex, tone indicators may veer into the patronizing.
But these semantic constructions are part of a long tradition of social media users pushing back against platform limitations. Compared to hyper-customizable GeoCities and Myspace pages of old, platforms like Twitter and Facebook rigidly restrict how much latitude users have in formatting posts.
In response, people often create informal hacks to communicate with nuance and address ever-shifting norms around language and identity. Occasionally platforms end up incorporating user-generated features, like quote-tweets, which Twitter adopted after users spent years doing so manually.
Twitter users may soon be able to indicate at least one new tone. The site is reportedly exploring the addition of a dislike button.
All the Things We Have Tried Before Over the Centuries
For ages, posters on forums like Reddit have used “/s” at the end of a post to indicate sarcasm. But the history of tone indication is much older.
In her book “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation,” the grammar historian Lynne Truss describes how, in 1575, a British printer named Henry Denham created a punctuation mark called the “percontation point,” a reversed question mark meant to indicate that a question was rhetorical. (“It didn’t catch on,” Ms. Truss writes.)
A century later, in his 1668 work “An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language,” the Anglican clergyman and philosopher John Wilkins proposed that ironic statements could be indicated with an inverted exclamation mark.
“Wilkins’s choice of the ¡ seems most appropriate,” Keith Houston writes in his book “Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks.” “The presence of an exclamation mark already modifies the tone of a statement, and inverting it to yield an i-like character both hints at the implied i-rony and simultaneously suggests the inversion of its meaning.”
That didn’t catch on either. “Wilkins’s invention was not only the first of many proposed irony marks, but also the first of them to fail,” Mr. Houston writes.
In 2010, a company in Michigan called Sarcasm, Inc. released the “SarcMark,” essentially a dot inside of a squiggle. It was marketed as “the official, easy-to-use punctuation mark to emphasize a sarcastic phrase.” Initially sold as a font download for $1.99, it’s now available for free as a sticker pack for iMessage.
In a 2001 post, the blogger Tara Liloia proposed that tildes might be used to indicate sarcasm.
“The closest thing to a sarcasm mark is the winking smiley — and he isn’t really a professional tool. You can’t write a missive to a business associate with little cutesy ASCII faces in it. It’s just not done,” she wrote. “And no one can claim that sarcasm isn’t professional. If the amount of sarcasm in the American workplace is any indication, sarcasm is nothing but professional!”
“My solution,” she concluded, “is the tilde. ~”
While the tilde also never reached critical mass, cutesy emoji faces achieved global dominance, even among business associates. They’ve been around nearly as long as internet communication itself: The smiley face emoticon “:-)” is generally credited to a 1982 message from Scott E. Fahlman, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, after a misunderstanding that occurred when a colleague posting on the proto-internet service ARPANET made a dry joke about mercury contaminating an elevator shaft.
The utility of emoticons for tone indication quickly spread off-campus: A few months later, a researcher named James Morris sent a message titled “Communication Breakthrough” to his colleagues at the research lab Xerox Parc.
“Because you can’t see the person who is sending you electronic mail you are sometimes uncertain whether they are serious or joking,” he wrote in a message that would likely result in a very sincere cancellation today. “Recently, Scott Fahlman at CMU devised a scheme for annotating one’s messages to overcome this problem. If you turn your head sideways to look at the three characters :-), they look sort of like a smiling face. Thus, if someone sends you a message that says ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?:-)’ you know they are joking. If they say ‘I need to talk to you :-(,’ be prepared for trouble.’”
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December 09, 2020 at 10:25PM
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Tone Indicators and How to Use Them - The New York Times
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