The way we text builds our texting persona
Can you tell who is typing by the typographical tone of voice of their texts?
If your answer is Yes/Maybe, you are not alone.
There will be times when a friend, roommate, sibling, or even significant other will respond on ones phone. If you message with this person a lot, there is a chance you can tell it is them by the way they text.
How, you ask? Because you are already used to a person writing to you in a particular way and now the unusual typographical tone of voice bothers you just like if that person acted weirdly or displayed a different behaviour in a physical environment and you would be surprised with their offset physical self.
Their typing style becomes part of their online written identity and their unique personality becomes more prominent after frequent text interactions. It is easier to spot them more in your close relationships and frequent textual interactions, and takes a while in new connections or acquaintances. That’s because of the repetitive nature of word usage in a peculiar way which forms patterns that your brain starts to recognize with time. The person’s writing style — consistency of word adornment, typical emoji and punctuation use becomes so strong that when someone start to use words they don’t generally use or someone else replies on their behalf, you can get alarmed and confused, just like me.
I was once chatting with my cousin on Whatsapp. After sometime, her responses started to get delayed. I ignored them because she was a new-mom then and an infant/toddler can take up a lot of one’s physical and mental headspace, leaving no room and time for instant text replies. After a few more text exchanges, I started to feel a change in her replying style. The delay wasn’t longer like before but now her replies didn’t match to her usual way of replying that I was used to. She normally would type ‘hahahaha’ to laugh at my jokes and now it was “ha ha ha”. When agreeing, she would use ‘yeah! or yes!’ but now it was ‘yup!’. My ‘addicted-to-details’ brain noticed the unusual spaces and exclamations, her use of extremely short phrases, and answers in a either a yes or a no (yup! and nope!).
That day, I was about to share a very private life event with her, but I resisted to do so. It was the text’s typographical tone of voice that was offbeat and didn’t quite match with her usual tone. I wasn’t sure if it was really her I’m texting with and at the same time was confused as why would someone else reply as my cousin. I ended the conversation and we got busy in our lives.
The next day, while reading a great book called “Because Internet” by Gretchen McCulloch, I recalled this incident when I came across a chapter called ‘Typographical tone of voice’ where McCulloch shares that “Writing is no longer lifeless” and how online written interactions reveal about who we are. Her book is a good read and helped me deep-dive into my intuition of someone impersonating as my cousin on a text message.
A few days later, when I was on a call with her, I asked her why was she acting so weird when replying to me. Initially she couldn’t understand the context and when she did, she laughed and said “O! It was your brother-in-law who was replying on my behalf as I was busy and asked him to do so”. I got annoyed and told her I won’t ever share anything with her over texts (of course). But this incident made me ponder more on my thought that the way we text actually defines who we are and builds our online conversation persona.
Our written words, their adornment style (use of punctuation styles, uppercase/lowercase, gaps between words), the list of frequently used emojis are all building blocks of our online conversation personality. Internet writing is mostly informal and informal writing has no rules — that is the beauty of it. People can express themselves in a written language that is close to the way they speak, incorporating their style even when they write something as informal and quick as a text message.
I also feel with AI advances in our lives, assistive writing prompts in informal text writing would kill the personality behind the words. I’m glad that has only touched emails for now. It does help speed up a lot by cutting down number of words, structuring, correct grammar etc. to help write formal emails better. But can possibly kill the creative expression, ever-changing nature, no-rule/free state of language of the casual texting space. No wonder there are people who write in all lowercase fighting the autocorrect when texting, maybe because they like to define their style and express themselves the way they want.
Also, the times are not faraway when AI will be readily available for you to create a virtual assistant/chatbots for your own self, just like avatars. One of the tasks might be to reply to text messages on busy days. For AI to be successful in impersonating someone, it will have to understand these writer personas and nuances a person uses in her/his casual writing, besides written English. Otherwise the conversation can fall flat just like poorly designed conversations in chatbots which sound the same on all websites and provide you with links you have already visited as help.
