How do you perceive tone through text? Particularly text messages on mobile devices or in games. Does it depend on the person sending the message? How well you know the person? The conversation at hand? The punctuation being used?
Perhaps it has a lot to deal with your current mood and how you, as the receiver of the text, are feeling at the time.
I find that I can send a neutral message to two different people and get two completely different responses.
This even goes for Facebook/Twitter statuses. Sometimes I'll post a funny or witty comment as a status. A joke I came up with that day lets say, I do this a lot. Some people will know I'm just being silly, others will take it seriously, some people will even ask if I'm angry/depressed/gloomy.
Its odd how there can be such a wide range of interpretations for one simple comment. It makes a person really realize that the majority of the way we communicate is not just words, its body signals, facial expressions, tone of voice. These are very important features being lost in communication with the inventions of text messaging, online chat, even the telephone. Misinterpretation of communication must be at an all time high.
It makes me think that there really isn't any ideologies, or very few anyway, behind text messaging; especially at the 140 characters allowed per text. A person cannot fully explain themself when being restrained by the character limit. There's no general guidelines to show how you're feeling in a text. I find myself sending a smiley face (emoticon) in a lot of messages such that the person on the other end of the transmission doesn't get confused about how I feel. But these text based faces also carry their own ideologies unique to the user and can be misinterpreted. I think that putting a :P kind of emoticon means just kidding, or that I'm playing around. Others may interpret as sexual, or crazy.
I guess the best way to make sure a person knows exactly how you're feeling and what you're talking about is to speak with them face-to-face. Even then there can be miscommunication though. You may think a person is a liar because they won't make eye contact with you when in reality they just don't like making eye contact. I know a lot of people who don't feel comfortable with making eye contact.
Back to the point however, with text messaging, how is a sense of tone gathered for you? What do you look for in a message to signal if a person is happy, sad, joking, serious, or whatever else. What o the emoticons mean to you?
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