Technology has made a big hole in our daily lives through social networks, apps , the ubiquitous tablets… But, how can these influence our communication processes?

We are increasingly connected, although the physical barriers that exist between people when communicating online, make them a useful tool to facilitate our routines, but being a complement without replacing direct human contact. The world of applications and social networks allows us to recreate more or less faithfully a direct communicative process between sender and receiver, p ero it is not the same to be in front of the webcam and be able to appreciate the non-verbal language, than to interpret a text message .

The sender-receiver scheme in social networks

Human communication is not a simple thing. There is never the situation where information travels cleanly from one person to another: there are always gaps for misunderstandings, hidden meanings behind words and double meanings .

This is because the sender-channel-receiver scheme is affected by physical barriers, our ways of interpreting phrases and words, and even our emotional state, which in some cases can lead, for example, to raised tones in a conversation. In communication there is always a margin for unexpected dynamics to appear: phrases that are unfortunate, confusion with double meanings, etc.

Communication problems increase when we interact from the Internet

Not being face to face makes these potentially problematic contingencies arise more often. However, the use of social networks and electronic devices that are used to communicate do not influence the way we communicate just by hiding contextual or gestural information.

For example, the sense of security surrounding the comfort area from which comments can be made can create the phenomenon of depersonalisation when attacking other participants without measure. The fact that they are separated from each other makes the members of a conversation behave differently . To be able to carry out a discourse analysis and to be able to interpret the emphases, movements, looks and symbols that are relevant to the speaker, it is necessary to be able to access a certain personal proximity, as well as to be able to strengthen the capacity for empathy and assertiveness.

A clear example can be the comments made in Facebook posts regarding a topic or opinions. This is an incomplete communicative process, in which anyone can stop answering at any time, can answer without having read the messages that have been told before and can misinterpret the recipient of the sentences, among other things. This is why sometimes falls into the overjustification of what is said, creating very extensive contributions that make the conversation slower .

Creating perfect avatars

The distance creates the opportunity to offer the public an ideal image of the self through profile photos, publications and so on, but cognitive dissonances between the “real self” and the “ideal self” may appear, which are somehow temporarily solved by the social masks that the user may create, in addition to the development or expression of the own ego.

We can find examples in publications in groups that could well be social experiments, and if they were not, they are a great source of information about the communicative processes in social networks and how sympathies are configured to create new networks.

Groups of people from a city, pages with viral content, etc. They contain information about the conversations and how the “I’s” interact to show a desired public profile in the discussions. As banal examples of conflicts that can illustrate this, we find the replies to comments about spelling, or how to reinforce the arguments internet search engines are used by copying and pasting concepts and quotes created by third parties .

All this is facilitated by the comfort of the home and the ease of access to information on the web, in addition to the security generated by not having in front of you the person who is talking to you.

New forms of harassment

It could also be studied in more depth the cases of cyberbullying , which personally remind me of Milgram’s famous experiment on submission to authority (but in this case without a socially accepted authority figure). The processes of diffusion of responsibility are facilitated when people are not physically present, since comments can easily be deleted, which is why many people choose to make screen captures in order to have evidence on cases of abuse .

These processes have been going on for a long time, but the communication channel and the context have changed making it more complex. In social network communication there are multiple factors that determine a person’s behaviour.

For this reason and much more, it is not superfluous to encourage reflection on how we can use social networks to improve our power of communication between people , beyond using them as a means of entertainment or to seek social acceptance through the image we want to show the public.