Jessica Love wonders if we will develop a system “to help us convey the particularities of our communication tools,” increasingly an imperative in an age when conversations take place across multiple devices:
Language is ripe with conventions, and though they can differ drastically from one situation or medium to the next, they are generally understood—or at the very least understood to be understood—by everyone involved. Thus, most of us take care to manage expectations when the unexpected arises. “Sorry, I’m losing my voice,” our waitress warns. (Don’t lowball your tip just because I don’t sound peppy.) “I’m taking a vacation from Facebook,” a friend cautions. (I won’t be “liking” everything you post.) “I will be out of the office through the end of the month,” a coworker auto-replies. (Unless you are really important, I’m not going to respond to your email until August.)
Increasingly, though, we must also manage expectations about the very devices we use to communicate. It is no longer obvious whether, say, an email was typed on a smart phone, a tablet, or a computer—or perhaps composed using a mobile dictation application, or something else altogether (something with a broken screen!). And yet, as they’ve always been, our messages are very much shaped by the method we use to communicate them.
An example:
Consider the “Sent from my iPhone” message that now accompanies so many emails. I actually welcome it as a caveat of sorts: I’m typing using the teeny keyboard on my phone, it says—my response may be abrupt and error-prone. (And the caveat works! Journalist Clive Thompson describes a 2012 study demonstrating that people who send emails with spelling and grammatical errors are deemed more credible when their sendoff is trailed by “Sent from my iPhone” than when it is not.)
The Dish 