Hazards of truncated communication

On his Broadcasting Brain blog Mark Dykeman recently posted I like print media just fine thanks in which he talks about how easy it is to miscommunicate, particularly in the truncated world of Twitter. I commented and afterwards thought the comment was worth posting here as well. So I grabbed it and here it is:

With Twitter, it’s a bit of a no-win situation. There are three things that affect communication as it applies to Twitter. The obvious one is the 140 character limit. The upside is the emphasis on brevity, the downside is the difficulty in achieving clarity.

The second thing is the way we read online, emphasized even more so with Twitter. We don’t really read, we scan. So it is very easy to misread a tweet’s intention and meaning.

These two aspects stress the importance of being careful about what and how we write. It stresses the editorial function. But …

Number three pops up, real-time communication. Where something is immediate, taking time to fashion a tweet so it says exactly what you mean and does so in a way that minimizes the chance of misinterpretation, is difficult at best.

I don’t think there is away around this problem other than to be aware of how easily we can miscommunicate and to do our best to be clear within the limits imposed. (I often use smiley’s like or an lol, although I hate them, simply because I worry someone might misunderstand what I’m saying.)