Wednesday 10 December 2008

An e-Squibble

I just had a most interesting experience. I had a quarrel with someone via Gmail-chat. Have you ever tried arguing via chat?! It’s quite difficult! The to-and-thro doesn’t happen chronologically. The tit-for-tat sequence is constantly interrupted. While one person is still replying on one comment, the other is already making a new point. And then there’s the comments that get lost in between and later referred to and since the context has changed in the mean time you don’t know how to respond. And waiting for the other person to finish typing can be quite frustrating, because your own ideas are running ahead, so you start to type them so long, resulting in mixed messages and further misunderstandings. Eventually the argument is so fragmented and deconstructed it will give Derida a headache.

I wonder if teenagers, who are used to this method of communicating, will be more adapt to argue using chat. Good luck to them!

2 comments:

Lindi said...

reflection

From: Paulette Dale & James C. Wolf. 2006. Speech Communication Made Simple. 3rd Ed. Pearson-Longman.

improptu :-)?

Einstein's Brain said...

So deconstructed it will give Derida a headache. ha ha

I think the teenagers are generally more adept at that stuff. I am still glad I am not a teenager now. I think many children these days don't learn the same communication skills we learned as kids because they are so "wired".