Non-Verbal Communication Online
Food for Thought
One of the more entertaining exercises I take my Interpersonal students through each semester is demonstrating how (based on the commonly cited estimates of Birdwhistle and Merhabian) 65%-90% of our communication is non-verbal. It wouldn't be entertaining, of course, if I simply took them through the diverse range of non-verbal codes that we use in face to face communication. Those codes are usually pretty obvious to students, most of whom are aware of considerable effort into shaping their non-verbal personna.
The entertainment comes in demonstrating that the level of non-verbal communication associated with their daily interaction online is similarly high. Students usually find this completely surprising. They have already been schooled to expect online communication to be more impersonal than face to face, even as many broadcast personal details of their lives via Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube. Hence when I ask them how much non-verbal communication there is in e-mail, texting, instant messaging, online chats, discussion groups, and web pages, they are quick to say "not much".
We have a long tradition of discounting the extent to which nonverbal communication occurs in computer-based media. We still teach students that online media are more impersonal than face to face interaction. We still routinely teach variants of the "cues filtered out" perspectives of the 1980's, including Social presence theory, which suggested that lack of physical presence makes things more impersonal, Media Richness theory, which suggests that a lack of non-verbal channels makes computer media poor choices when nuanced communication is required, and Lack of Social Context approaches that suggest that, freed of a community, social inappropriate behavior like flaming becomes more likely.
The primary counter to these perspectives, Walther's Social Information Processing Theory, doesn't challenge "cues filtered out" approaches so much as it changes the focus. Instead of focusing on 'missing' externals (presence, channels, social context, etc), it shifts the the remedial qualities of such internals as personal impressions, relationship attributions, the processing of relationship information, and relationship development.
Social Information Processing doesn't deny "cues filtered out" perspectives so much as modify their implications. Where cues filtered out perspectives suggest that online relationships are problematic, social information processing suggests that people adapt to the constraints associated with different media. Indeed, the basic assumptions of cues filtered perspectives are embedded into the three step logic that sets up its basic predictions. Specically, it is assumed that (1) personal impressions are built on interpersonal information, (2) relationships are built on the basis of personal impressions, and (3) online media changes the kinds of the information we share (e.g. there are fewer non-verbal cues). Those assumptions lead to its fundamental prediction, that it takes longer to get to know people and build relationships when they interact online.
Which brings us to the entertaining exercise I do with my students. When I ask them to describe the nonverbal elements of an online medium like instant messaging, texting, web pages, e-mail, chat, or online discussion groups, they routinely come up with most or all of the following: emoticons, buddy icons/avatars, presence information, blocking, warning, typing information, acronyms (many of which represent behavioral feedback), screen names, timing, silence, away messages, capitilization, punctuation, color, font size, and more. While these are not the non-verbal languages of face to face interaction, there are over a dozen non-verbal languages associated with texting and they support many of the same purposes, including expressiveness, regulation of interaction, feedback, and message modification.
The point of this exercise is to demonstrate the ubiqitousess of non-verbal communication, even in an interpersonal medium in which cues are "filtered out". In this instance 13 of the 14 languages associated with instant messaging - roughly 93% of the codes in use - are non-verbal, which roughly corresponds with Merhabian's estimate for the portion of face-to-face interaction which is non-verbal. One shouldn't make to much of this. Emoticons may serve the same essential function as facial expression, but there are of emoticons, they aren't nearly as rich in subtlety aor mobility. Presence indicators may serve the same functions as physical presence, but they are neither as obvious nor as potentially threatening as physical presence. Few of the non-verbal languages of the online environment are currently rich as their face-to-face counterparts.
But one shouldn't make too little of it either. None of these means of non-verbal interaction were even dreamed up thirty years ago as reearchers like Hiltz and Turoff first tried to understand the potential and implications of online media, but all are realities now.
The obvious flaw in the cues filtered out perspective is that media are not limited by hardware and channel bandwidth nearly so much as they are enabled by human imagination. Media are social constructions, structurated by their users to meet their own needs. If a medium becomes seriously useful for interpersonal communication but it lacks a non-verbal language that is needed for the purposes of message modification, floor control, or emotional expression, we create a new language that will do the job using the materials at hand and, if necessary, additional materials in the form of changes to the structure of the medium.
Restricted cues (e.g. "cues filtered out") are symptomatic of young media that have not yet been structurated in much the same way that unpoliced "wild west" behavior is. The more widely a medium is, the longer the period over which it has been used, and the younger users are when they first start using the medium (linguistics has useful things to say about this), the more likely it is that solutions that provide usable replacements for the "missing" cues will socially constructed. Indeeed, it is sometimes possible to observe the construction of these "structurated cues" in the course of long term observation of interaction within a medium.
The things we think we know that turn out to not be true are an important jumping off point for generating better theory. Walther himself questioned the validity of Social Information Processing during a session at NCA this past year. It is time to start collecting the exceptions, and to start thinking harder about the extent to which the richness of interaction within a medium is more a function of human imagination than physical cues.
Food for thought.
Davis Foulger
Do you have a response to Davis’s pundits? Have something you would like to ponder in this column? Please submit your responses or Food for thought toto John Howard at howardjo@ecu.edu