The absence of the body in blogging

My friend Paul hasn't replied to what I wrote on his blog in my previous post. In it I was trying to write something about the nature of blogging as a form of communication. Perhaps it doesn't have a nature. I am going to continue for the moment as if it had.

Lost but determined, I decided to stumble on in the dark looking for light elsewhere. I went to the Technorati search engine, typed in "nature of online communication" and came across an interesting post from early this year entitled 'reflections on communication'. It was written by the_tower, a student of Chinese, Psychology and Japanese at the University of California at Berkeley (I give the link only below at the end, wanting you to read this through rather than jump now to Berkeley).

I am going to keep this short as one of my main intentions in writing is to try to elicit a response from the_tower and I am not sure whether I can alert him to this post. I don’t want to have wasted much time, if I find that I have wasted it.

the_tower bemoans the absence of other people’s physical presence in online communication. Without facial expressions and gestures to read and without visual cues generally it is, he writes, difficult to interpret correctly what people say. The result can be misunderstanding, taking things up the wrong way, a breakdown in communication.

What most interests me in the_tower’s thoughts is the sense he gives of how the other person, or other people, are almost present. Online communication, blogging in particular, has the form of a conversation between two or more people, even if it is not, literally, a conversation. It is virtually (in the sense of 'almost' ) one. There is a desire for an immediate response, for the other’s, or others’, presence. Are you there?

Here is the_tower’s post.

 

Comments

[the_tower]

hi, sorry for getting back so late.

I don't know what TrackBack is, so I doubt I got anything. I did read this post in response to your comment on my LJ.

To be honest I'm a little surprised you found that post, as most things I say on my blog goes unnoticed by all save my friends (and flist).

The post in question was originally composed in a fit of annoyance at the number of spats that occur in the various fandoms between opinionated fans, not only because of how stubbornly they cling to their own beliefs and refuse to give any leeway to the opinions of others, but also because many of those spats could have been avoided if the writers had attempted to communicate their thoughts more clearly. A lot of these fandom wars are reported and mocked at a Journal Fen community called Fandom Wank (http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank). Thoughts about the immense popularity of Fandom Wank and of the frequency with which certain online community gets reported there led to thoughts about the pitfalls of communication online in general, which led to the post. Another thing that prompted the post was my personal experience with instant messaging through programs like AIM, where if I don't know someone personally, it's slightly harder to establish some sort of connection or rapport with someone.