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The curious case of 'chatting' and their possible resemblance with human speech

BurnedOut

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I find chatting a very fascinating phenomenon not because it is a relatively new mode of communication but also because it defies the usual constraints of scientific reasoning about its implications.

Chatting is a language of its own. It is constantly evolving but the idea of it disappearing in a few decades is getting more and more prevalent now due to growing share of video and audio content, I think it is far from being the case. I think that chatting is very similar to natural human speech. Perhaps, any writing mode has been for the first time has become as intuitive as human speech.

The semantics are entirely different, so is the vocabulary, however, I think the predominance of infusions of mother tongues and other spoken languages in their spoken forms lead to a dialect of those language which amazingly turns out to be wide-domain. For example, if there are several dialect of my mother tongue, it is usually difficult for me to accurately understand a variation of my own mother tongue, however, that will not be the case with chatting as people are able to somehow morph the semantics into being more global in exuding the correct meanings. I also believe that chatting has a body language of its own. I think you can quite accurately read between the lines by noticing the amount of pauses a person takes, the relative amount of mistakes, the placement of dots, etc. All this is already being researched on. In my opinion, this is mainly the result of chatting involving near-instant feedback. I theorize that the near-instant feedback causes pseudo-dialoguing. I also think that chatting evokes someone's visual and aural imaginations. It feels amazingly real to chat with someone in real time. Not the best alternative to face to face conversations and any kind of audiovisual feedback but chatting does the job of quenching the thirst of socialization to a great extent. It looks like anything that provides instant feedback in varied manners within the context of input is regarded as sentient and hence an attachment follows.

If chatting indeed is a second form of intuitive human communication, then indeed, it needs to be taken much more seriously than it is usually taken. I think there is not much psychometric research on chatting.
 

scorpiomover

The little professor
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I find chatting a very fascinating phenomenon not because it is a relatively new mode of communication but also because it defies the usual constraints of scientific reasoning about its implications.
Chatting is a form of social reinforcement. You can see chimps engage in regular physical contact as a form of ergular social reinforcement.
Chatting is a language of its own. It is constantly evolving but the idea of it disappearing in a few decades is getting more and more prevalent now due to growing share of video and audio content, I think it is far from being the case.
If you look at the types of things being posted on social media these days, it's things like "It's my birthday", "I got married!" and "I had a baby". These are the sorts of things people used to say when chatting, before the popularity of internet-based social media.

So I am inclined to think that it's more likely that you can chat online just as you can chat IRL. These days, more of people's chat is online, because more of people's general communications and conversations are now online.

But the chat is still there, just on social media.
The semantics are entirely different, so is the vocabulary, however, I think the predominance of infusions of mother tongues and other spoken languages in their spoken forms lead to a dialect of those language which amazingly turns out to be wide-domain. For example, if there are several dialect of my mother tongue, it is usually difficult for me to accurately understand a variation of my own mother tongue, however, that will not be the case with chatting as people are able to somehow morph the semantics into being more global in exuding the correct meanings.
The point of chatting is the social reinforcement between people in the same group, like hugging.

If everyone hugged differently, then it would be very difficult for people to hug each other. Then hardly anyone would hug anyone, and the benefits of hugging would be mostly lost.

In the same way, the benefits of chatting are going to be dependent on the number of people you chat to and give social reinforcement to. So those who gain more by chatting, and thus have an evolutionary advantage, are going to be those who can chat to more people by using a mode of expression in chat that is going to appeal and be understood by more people. So chat has an evolutionary pressure in favour of the types of speech that more people would understand.

Over time, chat would evolve into a global speech that can be understood by everyone.

That's not going to be the case with important conversations like those you have with your lawyer or your accountant, because you won't tell most people what you would tell your lawyer or your accountant. So there's no evolutionary pressure to use more global speech with important conversations.

I also believe that chatting has a body language of its own. I think you can quite accurately read between the lines by noticing the amount of pauses a person takes, the relative amount of mistakes, the placement of dots, etc.
Chatting serves a different function to that of important communications. So we can expect that the mode of speech and the body language will again evolve differently.

However, even in important communications, some of the conversation will turn to social reinforcement, to reinforce the communication itself. So some of the conversation will be chatting and not about anything important.

So we can expect that some of the body language that is present during chat, will also be present in important communications, but only in the content that is not directly relevant to the subject matter and is really chatting for social reinforcement.

If chatting indeed is a second form of intuitive human communication, then indeed, it needs to be taken much more seriously than it is usually taken. I think there is not much psychometric research on chatting.
I can see why.

A lot of people who go into STEM subjects, tend to be people who claim to either be poor at chatting, or are not interested in chatting and think it's a waste of time. So they go into jobs with important stuff like STEM, so they can AVOID chatting.

Asking such a person to then study chat, would be asking them to deliberately focus on things that they so avoid, that they chose to be scientists partially so they would never have to even think about chatting, and now you're asking them to do a study on chat and think about chatting for the 2-3 years of the study.

Even so, scientists don't study what they want to study. They study things they have a grant for, which is determined by the grant board, and whoever is paying for the scientists.

So in reality, it just means that there's not many governments or corporations looking to study chatting.

However, if a government/corporation discovered that chat could be used to convince people to do/buy things, then I could expect that they'd want a study done.

But often, studies are payed for to promote views that would be advantageous to governments/corporations, if lots of people believed them.

So effectively, this just means that governments/corporations aren't bothered about using chat to promote their agendas, because they already have a mechanism that is successful at promoting their agendas.

So there's no need for a study on chat at the moment, to push politics and sales.
 
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