DESIGN FLAW

The New York Times recently ran an article about flaming on the internet, and tied it to neurophysiological research dealing with online behavior.

The emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of what goes on in the brains and bodies of two interacting people, offers clues into the neural mechanics behind flaming.

This work points to a design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain’s social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy. This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do next will keep the interaction on track.
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Socially artful responses emerge largely in the neural chatter between the orbitofrontal cortex and emotional centers like the amygdala that generate impulsivity. But the cortex needs social information — a change in tone of voice, say — to know how to select and channel our impulses. And in e-mail there are no channels for voice, facial expression or other cues from the person who will receive what we say.

True, there are those cute, if somewhat lame, emoticons that cleverly arrange punctuation marks to signify an emotion. The e-mail equivalent of a mood ring, they surely lack the neural impact of an actual smile or frown. Without the raised eyebrow that signals irony, say, or the tone of voice that signals delight, the orbitofrontal cortex has little to go on. Lacking real-time cues, we can easily misread the printed words in an e-mail message, taking them the wrong way.

The article concludes with a proposed solution that looks about 20 years out of date:

One proposed solution to flaming is replacing typed messages with video. The assumption is that getting a message along with its emotional nuances might help us dampen the impulse to flame.

It seems to me that the proposed ‘solution’ above totally misses the point. The fact that we have different physiological responses to communication over the internet isn’t a ‘design flaw’, whatever that means. Rather, it shows that the Internet offers a fundamentally new form of social interaction, and with that comes new rules of etiquette and appropriate behavior. That also means that our responses don’t need to mirror our more traditional forms of social interaction. Emoticons aren’t substitutes for genuine facial expressions, they are alternatives that express different kinds of responses and serve a different kind of social function.

The hope is not that the Internet will eventually come to replace existing face-to-face interactions. That’s just plain silly, and there is no reason to think that even full, high-quality video would replace the kind of contact we get in normal interactions. The hope is that the internet will generate new modes of interaction that don’t rely on traditional models of communication.