Psychology of facebook

Presented to the Santa Barbara Institute
for Consciousness Studies

Part two

Continued from [part one]  Now I want to talk about ‘discourse analysis’ and what it reveals about communication over social networks. Discourse analysis is the branch of psychology dealing the way people process information from what they hear and read. I think it’s telling. Face to face communication is a probabilistic event. Language is a relatively narrow band of communication that can only suggest what the speaker has in mind. This presents the listener with a range of possibilities. Communication is successful only when the listener infers the most likely meaning intended by the speaker. Ordinary conversation is generally successful because we have context to help guide us along. We rely on facial expressions, intonation, emphasis, location and other visual and auditory cues. However, where ordinary communication is probabilistic, text messaging is a crapshoot. Text is cryptic. Context is lost and we rely on memory to supply the missing cues. However, memory is fallible. Research in discourse processing has shown that the biggest piece of missing information we supply is the intention of the speaker ..and it’s their intention that we most often get wrong. We perceive threat where none was intended. Offense at what may have only been sarcasm. By nature, the flow of conscious experience is displaced over social networks. This simply means it occurs outside the context of our immediate situation. That’s the beauty of the Internet. It allows us to share experiences that are ‘displaced’ in time and space with users from all over the world. It also places a heavy burden on text comprehension, which is much less developed than speech comprehension in the language centers of the brain. I believe this will provide a rich source of field-observation for the study of human consciousness for years.