My go-to formula

ickplant@lemmy.world to Memes@sopuli.xyz – 954 points –
68

I never understood how human I was until I saw this meme and realized we all basically do this.

WHAT IF I USE ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME?

I'm going....to use random ellipses...everywhere. What does it....mean? Idk....but too many people....do it.

God I hate it. I pause every ellipses automatically in my head so I'm reading that much slower and it makes me angry.

I do it in specific instances where I want to express a pause, like "that was....ok?" I also use it when I want what I'm saying to come off as annoyed. "The shipment was late, again..."

I actually worry about exclamation points because I use them like OPs image, but I always worry people take it as yelling or something lol

I think they have attention span problems or something like that. They can't wait while they are forming sentences, so while they think of something, they add ellipses to their message.

I'm using a question mark because I'm unsure of myself?

I'm ending this with an exclamation point because I like to subvert expectations.

I'm ending with three exclamation points because I know what you did...

I always assume people who end statements with question marks talk like David from Schitt's Creek?

My autistic brain goes „WTF? Why would anyone do this?“ then proceeds to write incredibly long paragraphs with multiple statements wrapped into one, long sentence, using punctuation just to separate thoughts.

All this thoughtful and unambiguous use of punctuation builds in me the irrepressible temptation to foster uncertainty by ending this sentence with nothing but an emphasis

Thanks you "so much" plus exclamation point at the end of a simple text. Typical american enthousiasm here.

Dealing with American colleagues feels really weird sometimes. They're either very happy or really not amused.

It is funny to see how cultural differences can affect the use of the same langage.

I didn't think about that, but English isn't my first language and there are studies out there that say that you think different in languages that aren't your mothertongue. That being said, my English meetings with my British and my Eastern European colleagues still feel a lot more normal than meetings with American colleagues

It is not my mother tongue either but the British, or at least the English, are famous for being phlegmatic where as US-Americans are famous for being enthousiastic. Of course, it impact the way they speak.
But we'll need a british lemming and an american one to cheek on that.

enthousiastic

frenchman spotted

You are right. I so full of my (american) english corrector telling me I don't know how to write "neighbour" and "colour" that I don't trust him to spot abusive use of "ou".

And occasionally throw a ~ at the end of a sentence

Remember 🤔 to 🌸 use 🌺 emojis 😏to convey 🚜 your 👔 message 💌 with 🫂 extra 🧀 clarity 🥖and 🍯finesse 🙏

Kind of just more evidence that reducing human conversation into writing is reducing human communication to at most a handful of perceivable factors instead of the countless ways in which humans (and animals in general) communicate.

In other words, if it wasn’t already obvious the internet is corrosive to humanity.

I agree that text is poor in conveying intent, tone, etc. but text predates the internet by... at least a couple years (I'd have to check)

The oldest written text I've found in three seconds of research in contained in this ancient meme, which is believed to have originated in the early days of the internet. So while it's not enough to disprove your claim, it seems to suggest that text and internet actually started roughly at the same time, possibly building on top of each other.

See this is why I love Lemmy. There's always an academic around to point you in the right direction. Cheers !

I meant to make a point about how the internet has made unedited written conversation far more prevalent in everyday life. Edited and peer-reviewed writing is different from the majority of what people read and write on a daily basis (including myself, because obviously my initial comment could’ve used more time in the oven)

Absolutely, I understand. I was trying to be humorous but clearly text has failed me, and humanity at large, once again.

Actually the internet supports audio and video. If anything that's evidence that newspapers, books, and really everything before TV and radio is corrosive to human communication. Well that and text based forums like this are corrosive.

Just because a medium isn't perfect doesn't make it corrosive. The problem here is the way human brains deal with things, not the things themselves. TV and video also cause loads of problems, because people treat them as too real. It's a balance really.

You’re right, but I’m confident enough in saying that most people don’t film videos or record themselves saying what they want to in order to engage online most of the time. I mean to say that dropping a written comment on a Facebook, Reddit, Lemmy, Xitter, etc. post makes it far more easy for people to try to infer meaning where there is none. I’m convinced that sort of indirection that the internet has made a much more common element in human discourse has greatly influenced the increase in political polarization.

For example, if someone posts “#ACAB,”someone who was shot by a cop for stealing a loaf of bread is likely to relate to it and assume that OP completely understands their plight, but someone whose parent or sibling is a cop will likely assume that OP is prejudiced and presumptive when in actuality OP was just posting their gut reaction to the movie 21 Bridges.

Erm have you heard of TikTok or seen what goes on there? Loads of people posting about radical politics. It's not just text mediums. Radical opinions aren't new, terrorism and Nazis didn't start with the internet.

Also a strange example to choose. Cops in America are pretty bad. Police in general support the interests of capital just as much as they help ordinary people. I don't know if it's possible to build a society without some form of policing, but the system we have now isn't great.

Yes, of course there are people posting videos, but the vast majority of communication on the internet is via text by a long shot. My point isn't that someone is right or wrong in what they infer from or relate to in the writing, but my point is that the prevalence of unreviewed and unedited text in everyday life nowadays thanks to the internet has further increased the average size of the gap between an author's intent and the meaning that a reader infers from it. What I'm trying to say is that the wider the gap between intended meaning and inferred meaning gets, the more toxic the relationship between any given person and the public at large gets in general. Text-based communication makes it easy for that gap to be wide. Unreviewed text-based communication just widens that gap. Reading a lot of un-reviewed text based communication from other people makes that gap even wider. That's what I mean by corrosive.

Not really as you can actually post follow up questions on the internet.

TIL every great work of literature is corrosive to humanity. Guess I’ll burn my bookshelf.

I guess I didn’t include everything I ought to have to make my point (which honestly is evidence for my point).

Books are generally speaking written over long periods of time and go through plenty of editing and revision while internet comments and posts, especially from dumbasses like me, are not.

I love emojis for this, although they can certainly come across as cringy.

No, limitations in communication aren’t good or bad they simply create new opportunities. The problem isn’t how much is lost in text, the real problem is that English is being frozen in place because of spellcheck and new slang/patterns can’t evolve to account for the limitations of texting so you have to hamfistedly do stuff like use exclamation points as much as possible without using them in a row.

Spellcheck fundamentally fucks with communication over text because it assumes language is this thing that can be done right, in a correct form, and that mediating force from an algorithm creates a huge distance between people that more natural organic conversation doesn’t.

I feel seen! And I don't have a problem with it. It's fine. I like writing this way!

I got a new job last year and I wasn't used to people using exclamation points so much. Sometimes I would think I did something wrong because it seemed like they were yelling angrily at me.