Now and then: cues between what is said

Communication requires presence, self-presentation, cues beyond what is said, and learning to communicate well is a matter of mastering those cues — body language, breath, eye placement — that affect our meaning with or without our intention. The screen, of course, imposes a controlled distance between individuals, but privileging face-to-face conversations over those mediated by screen ignores the many ways we establish presence beyond physical proximity, through the use, or misuse, of text. The “human touch” — a phrase that is suggestive of something closer than what online interaction begets — gestures to the ways that human-ness is expressed through the screen. Hi is warmer and more familiar than hello, but hey borders on casual and unprofessional. This language sets the tone for the rest of the conversation, and characterizes a friendly voice. Hii, hiiii, and heyy communicate both different levels of enthusiasm, and different kinds of enthusiasm; the rules of grammar and syntax mean less than the language developed and understood within the window. 

We rely on autocorrect as we once did spell check, but there is a difference between the two. Spell check brings the mistake to our attention: It scans, compares, signals, and verifies the error. Autocorrect makes the correction without our permission — without understanding the error. When “fucking” becomes “ducking,” the word sheds its intended meaning and function for something new and senseless. The modifier becomes modified, and what is meant to heighten a phrase to a certain degree of intensity (“fucking”) makes it a blunder instead. Each letter is a unit of communication, a symbolic material measuring carefully what we mean, what we do not mean, what tone we intend.  

Typos caught in hindsight act as a kind of descriptive metadata, telling us something more than what’s stated, about how and in what conditions the statement was made. Sometimes the mistake is a slip of the fingers; sometimes it’s a product of the way the brain runs faster than the hand. Sometimes it’s the opposite, as if our hand runs faster than our minds, or answers to a different command. The words that are dropped, the phrases uncompleted, are telling. The phrase i ducking love u expresses a deeper infatuation than the words spelled correctly.

Philip Pamela Dungao, Error messages.