After the short break from these “texting perspective” pieces (I wrote about this idea that prayer isn’t really a problem—shameless plug), I have returned with vigor to yet another unpleasant reality that accompanies texting. Yes, that’s correct ladies and gentlemen; I’m talking about misreading a text and the meanings behind it. As I’ve stated a thousand times before (that will probably be hyperlinked to another one of the articles I wrote) texts are devoid of emotion. And that’s because most of our actual interactions with emotions come from interpreting body language, intonation, eye contact—people who are lying avoid it like clichés—and other physical signifiers like tears.
With texting, there is none of that. Words, devoid of human interaction, cannot convey their intent. The person receiving the texts has to apply meaning to the words and depending upon their own sum of experiences and life lessons and preference in brand of coffee (using the word “coffee” in an article makes it twice as likely to be shared). The words have no meaning on their own.
“Hold up,” you say, “What about books, Mr. Cornface? We cried when Dumbledore died and we felt vaguely sad when we read "To Kill a Mockingbird." That pokes a whole lot of holes in your “words have no real meaning” argument. And to that I say, you are absolutely right dear reader. But what books and stories and Odyssey articles possess that text messages do not is context.
That’s right, context clues back at it again, all the way from the first grade when you still had to try to pin down the meaning of words while reading "The Cat in the Hat" and they decide to drop the word context on you. Context is this neat thing that we use to figure out what words mean. And I’m not talking gregarious words like gregarious or pulchritude or any junk like that. I’m talking words that we already know, but that are being used in ways that we are either unfamiliar with or totally familiar with.
We cried when old Dumblydork died because of all the context that surrounded him: teacher, wise, kind, pseudo-father figure, good, and etcetera. Did we cry when Quirrell bit the old magical bullet? NO. Never mind that he was a shy, unconfident book-worm whose only crime was being naïve enough to let Voldywart use him as a human…something, I don’t even know. But Quirrell didn’t have the same context Dumble-doorknob did. He was ostracized from us immediately and thus, we didn’t cry at his unfortunate fate. Shit happens, you strange, two-faced, stammering fool.
Back to the point, texting defies all these contextual helping hands that help us do the job of reading. Texts construct their meaning from previous texts, which could have been misinterpreted and then the next text conveys a different meaning and the text after that and this vicious cycle can continue indefinitely. We literally read way too far into a text: we have to compare and contrast that meaning from a previously constructed meaning and then try to figure out how to convey our meaning not realizing that the person on the other end is doing the same thing because they are not omniscient.
Humans are bad enough at conveying what they mean when they’re talking in person so you can imagine how fucked (I imagine Odyssey articles are like PG-13 movies and I only get one “f***” so I have to make it count) it all gets after a while of communicating solely through a medium which defies context and humanness. Great Odin’s raven, that’s depressing. And this is not taking into account the fact that people can say things they don’t mean—that’s right, lie—and that literally takes us into areas that make true human connection seem incredibly hopeless and unobtainable.
I misread your texts because I can’t fill in what you mean. I can only fill in what I know or believe you mean and that is fundamentally flawed. You probably misread my texts as well and then we end up not actually communicating but just straight up miscommunicating our way through an entire conversation. This makes the entire idea of actually texting someone seem really terrifying and could be the reason (cue hyperlink) why no one seems to want to answer texts anymore. As you can see, texting confronts us with far more problems of language than we ever really consider when we go to text someone. And with that, I’ll end this here. I have some texts to misread.
P.S. Sorry about the Dumblydur death spoiler.
