RR Corner: from sombre to humour!: You are what you Tweet

By Ritesh(R) Chugh and Ripan(R) Sethi

RR face a reasonable amount of criticism from their family members for spending an inordinate time communicating on Facebook. However, the school of thought we believe in sees social media time as productive by directly contributing to our level of social awareness. You obviously have the right to argue otherwise. Nonetheless, this article is based on some of our social media learnings, largely around written communication, which we have been witnessing lately.

We often see people taking their communication style on social media too casually, only to find that it has left a non-repairable dent on a valuable relationship. Written communication has an inherent challenge of misinterpretation, as the readers miss your body language – hand gestures, subtle facial expressions or even a sarcastic wink. In addition to that if you ignore your glorious saviour smiley emoticon, you simply lose control of how the message should be read and are at the mercy of the recipient’s mood that would often define the tone of their response.  For instance, a simple response such as ‘sorry, not available’ to a dinner invitation could be interpreted as rude, if the recipient is already having a bad day, unless it is accompanied by a sad smiley, which could increase the chances of it being read as ‘you are keen but just unable to make it’. In social media communication, you need to think beyond just having structured punctuation and the choice of words to avoid running the risk of being misunderstood. So does that mean, you start putting emoticons in every sentence? Probably not! A balanced approach is what is recommended to avoid the persona of an overzealous teenager. However, not every social media conversation is going to be calm and pleasant and sometimes you need something more than the angry smiley to highlight your frustration, which is where Caps Lock can come in handy as it is likely to set the impression that you are trying to be louder than your normal self. Conversely, we don’t recommend the use of Caps Lock as it is akin to shouting in any form of communication. Whilst the forbidden pleasure of watching people tear each other apart over a trivial issue can sometimes be amusing, being a party to such instances can be really demanding, demeaning and draining (3D). Defending your viewpoint in an online battlefield with potentially the whole virtual neighbourhood watching is no less than a matter of life and death. It is one of the reasons why a large population of Netizens avoid any form of confrontation online.

Lastly, anything that goes up on the Internet can’t be essentially taken down, so make sure your contribution to the World Wide Web passes a basic quality filter. We often see umpteen examples of people who are great at expressing themselves verbally but can easily leave their audience perplexed with their writing style. Sometimes too much focus on impressing the audience with vocabulary can lead to grammar slipping through the cracks, thus taking the real message down too.

Have you heard the redefined statement ‘You are what you Tweet’ (a modified version of an old saying ‘You are what you eat)? The statement is indeed the deduction of a focus of communication and personality. Your personality comes out via your written communication on social media. And please don’t fool your audience. They know whether it is you writing or someone else for you or whether you have just copied content from somewhere without acknowledging the original sourceJ.

Finally, like RR, please do indulge in the guilty pleasure of social media but in policed moderation.