Written communication and tone of voice

[RoomToDream]

I'm starting to think that we need better ways of communicating tone in written communication. Urgently, for the good of social cohesion!

How many arguments and misunderstandings on here (and the internet generally) are caused by people misinterpreting tone?

So many accusations of rudeness or hyperbole would be understood as brevity and sarcasm in speech.

There is a snobbery around the use of emojis in certain contexts but at least they help clarify tone in some cases. That is, until interpretations change like the thumbs up emoji being seen as passive aggressive!

Why can't we get this right in written communication? Or is this particularly an English thing? Does this cross anyone else's mind when they see the disagreements on other posts?

👎✍️📄🤖

I use emojis to convey my tone accurately, which means I only use the milder ones like smiley, confused and so on. Apparently Gen Z considers this passive aggressive, but what do they know? Young people are idiots, and I don’t care for their hyperbolic emojis.

The day someone online makes me roll around on the floor, crying with laughter, will be the day I use that emoji.

I exhaust myself with my overuse of emojis 😄😄 but I feel like my comment seems rude without them

When writing /s at the end shows sarcasm.

I googled this and found a whole list of tone indicators!

Looks like I'm heading into a wiki hole on the history of tone indicators. It's really interesting to see how these developed and changed over time.

I am not Gen Z at all (Gen X). Did you mean to be so rude and disrespectful to an entire generation?

Including tone of voice in writing is notoriously hard: Hence emojis fulfill a very useful role in texting and social media.

I also find on here that people leap to conclusions, which I find baffling. A fictitious example: water has been discovered on planet Zog which means life could be sustainable. A poster then replies with: you are ridiculous to suggest that humans could live on Zog. It then doesn't matter how many times I say that is not what I said or how much I explain it, I'll get several people insisting that is what I said.

🙄

I'm kind of hoping this is a jokey post to illustrate the point?