Is WhatsApp Affecting The Quality Of Communication?
In our current society we well know that we are fully immersed in the technological era, the virtual world and remote communications. “Face-to-face” contact is becoming obsolete and is being replaced at an astonishing speed by contact through social networks such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and other applications and networks that allow us to have conversations without leaving our home.
There is no doubt about the number of practical and speed advantages of new technologies, but… Does this type of virtual contact affect communication? Does it interfere in any way, perhaps hinder it? Or on the contrary, is it equally effective in all its aspects compared to “live” communication?
To begin to debate about this issue, we must keep in mind that Communication is based on three aspects he locutionary act, illocutionary and perlocutionary. In this way, experts refer to the act consisting of saying something, the intention or purpose of the speaker and the effects or consequences produced by this, respectively.
Different channels, different communication realities
In this sense, it is very interesting to know the contributions of the Canadian cognitive psychologist David R. Olson. This author has thoroughly investigated the relationship between written culture and thought. Among his main reflections, Olson states that exact transcription of speech into written language or reading is not possible His justification was based on the fact that, when moving from speaking to reading, we lose the illocutionary capacity of the language since the writing model itself does not represent said capacity.
Therefore, based on this theory, virtual communication would, in effect, maintain the locutionary and perlocutionary act. But, what about the illocutionary act? Prori, no.
WhatsApp and the different forms of online communication exclude the illocutionary act
Many aspects are included in speech communication that would be lost in written communication. Just like the prosodywhich would encompass a large number of relevant communicative aspects, such as the tone and height of the voice used (higher can denote nervousness and higher can mean discontent), the accent and intonation used.
And going even further, in the case of “face-to-face” speech communication, compared to virtual communication, we would be losing all the non-verbal information See where you direct your gaze, body movement and posture, gestures, facial expression… etc.
More differences and particularities of communication 2.0
Although on the other hand, Communicating virtually with an unknown person is not the same as communicating with a known person In the last case, a series of factors come into play, such as the experiences lived with that person, the knowledge in memory that you may have about their personality, subjective perceptions about them… etc.
All of this leads to a series of expectations, perceiving the things he says, knowing how to see “beyond” what he says and seeing how he says it, to the extent possible. These aspects would lead us to be able to make certain inferences about what the communicative intention of our interlocutor is or, as I have already mentioned before, his illocutionary act.
Conclusions and reflections
Given all the above, could we conclude that virtual communication is the same as face-to-face speech? Of course, no. But it would not be wise to consider that communication through new technologies should be condemned and discarded from our lives.
The fact that online communication dispenses with the illocutionary act is a half-truth. In reality, this very important aspect of communication depends largely on many factors. For example, of degree of knowledge of the other person, including the level of writing and the ability in written expression of the interlocutors, up to the level of written comprehension of the recipient. Furthermore, it should be taken into account that virtual communication applications incorporate a wide repertoire of emoticons, stickers and sounds through which this type of illocutionary understanding that would theoretically be excluded in this type of 2.0 communication can be supplied, with all logical limitations.
