Comments on: Pitfalls of Telephone Communication https://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2006/02/14/pitfalls-of-telephony/ Reflections on Technology Wed, 11 Feb 2026 11:00:17 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.40 By: Roy Schestowitz https://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2006/02/14/pitfalls-of-telephony/comment-page-1/#comment-5756 Wed, 15 Feb 2006 05:24:04 +0000 http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2006/02/14/pitfalls-of-telephony/#comment-5756 *nod* You are quite right. The role of ‘scare quotes’, as well as expression of emotions among text (in-line), is rather important. *smile* It is worth paying attention to context and even use emotion cues excessively.

]]> By: Christopher Allen https://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2006/02/14/pitfalls-of-telephony/comment-page-1/#comment-5754 Tue, 14 Feb 2006 19:53:21 +0000 http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2006/02/14/pitfalls-of-telephony/#comment-5754 All communication mediums have their issues. Like you, I personally loathe phone calls, however, when combined with a backchannel via a chat, IRC or a shared editing tool like SynchroEdit, I feel entirely different.

The original paper says the chance of picking correctly the intent of irony vs sincerity was no better then random chance. Choosing between irony vs sincerity is one of the toughest problems in plain text medium. One thing that makes it tough is that by convention we typically use “quotes” to show something is ironic. Yet this conflicts with using quotes for quotes, quotes for emphasis, and quotes for calling attention to a phrase — all common uses of quotes in text. No wonder we can’t interpret irony accurately.

There are also a number of other psychological and sociological causes for the cycle of flames, including over-interpretation of emotional content, emotional contagion, and lowered empathy during higher intensity emotions. I’ve written more about these in my blog at Flames: Emotional Amplification of Text.

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