Essay on Nonverbal Communication in a Chatroom

Communication takes place in any and all locations, intentionally and unintentionally, and it can be positive or negative. Many of our personal traits and character qualities can affect how we communicate with other people, and how they communicate with us. Recently, I had an experience that further proved this point to me in a very real and tangible way.

To me interpersonal communication describes the exchange of verbal and nonverbal messages between two different people. Joseph DeVito states that “interpersonal communication is inevitable, irreversible, and unrepeatable” due to these things effective communication is a necessary skill for us to function in our day to day lives (p. 20). Therefore, I have created a theory for interpersonal communication that goes as follows; To experience effective communication you must understand: your culture, the other person’s culture, and how to listen effectively. By knowing these three things you can consistently avoid misunderstandings and promote understanding in your interpersonal and intercultural relationships.

For as long as I can remember, I have been a fairly quiet person who wasn’t too keen on socializing with other people. Every time I found myself in a conversation I would wonder what was on the other person’s mind, and how they perceived me. For instance, I attempted to decipher their true intentions, if they were honest, or if they even liked me. Since I was so focused on those thoughts, I would often miss the concept of the message, as well as the signs that could have clarified my concerns. It is easier to distinguish and interpret another’s probity by observing eye behavior, touch, and other nonverbal cues in the communication context.

Technology can be positive through providing face to face live video and audio chats, but can also be detrimental when it comes to simple texting without nonverbal messages. Facetime has been able to provide expressions and voice cues that help bring meaning to verbal messages. Nonverbal communication is hard to fake and is more trustable. While, texting can be detrimental to relationships because the meanings of words are skewed since they don’t have nonverbal cues to give context and meaning to them. The relationships that is most influenced by technology is my friends at Uconn because we spend so much time together and the amount of closeness I feel with these people is no comparable to those affected only by technology because I feel a sort of closeness through maintaining a close distance to them and I have the ability to exchange vocal and facial cues.

The researchers believed that after the online communication and chat rooms became viral, the adolescents will have no social connectedness and well-being. They then figured out that they were wrong. They found out that online communication helps the adolescents social connectedness and well-being rather than reduces it. The researchers came up with three assumption about online communication and how it affects the adolescents. First, online communication stimulates online self-disclosure, second, online self-disclosure

While communication across cultures relies on speech to convey the messages of those living in the same society, usually the unspoken language has a larger role to play in delivering these messages. Similar to the country’s language being specific to the region it surfaces from, body language and facial expressions also have individual characteristics within a particular region. There are shared attributes of nonverbal communication across the world but these are commonly divided into high and low context cultures. This results from different cultural beliefs and attitudes within such societies and impact on the social norms of communication. In Japan, the citizens communicate with actions and gestures to a larger percent in comparison to their speech, as they are able to understand each other’s meaning without additional words. Due to it being a high context culture Japan relies heavily on its nonverbal communication for its society to function efficiently and for adequate comprehension to be achieved.

Furthermore how would we be able to transfer all of our knowledge to the next person, better yet, how would we improve our capacity of knowledge as a whole. We

One of the main oppositions to technology is how it causes us to be absorbed in our devices and not the world around us, and that is true, but technology has also given otherwise lonely people the chance to make friends with people online with similar interests. Forums and chat rooms allow for people to be able to talk about certain topics of their choice as well as provide a way to talk to people who you may have never been able to meet

It is difficult enough to interpret words accurately, in fact, there are no doubt more misinterpreted messages than not (Cherney and Tynan, 1990). When the element of nonverbal is incorporated, the rate of misinterpretations increases dramatically (Elgin, 1980).

In a romantic relationship, it is easy to have miscommunication between a man and a woman. “Most researchers agree that 70% or more of the meaning of any message is communicated through nonverbal channels like eye contact, facial expressions, posture, hand gestures, etc.” (Stinnett, 2015). Verbal and nonverbal messages are like a relationship, they work well together that way the message is sent and delivered appropriately and that there is no miscommunication. Women have their way of expressing themselves to their boyfriend, fiancé, and or husband and vice versa for men. This paper will focus on the varying behavior of gender in expressing the different type of emotions using nonverbal communication in a romantic relationship. Following

Nonverbal communication can be found within many objects on campus. Even though these objects do not send out direct messages, they still have significant meanings that can be captured by the public.

Face-to-face communication seems to be a dying art – replaced by text messaging, e-mails, and social media. Human communication and interactions are shaped by available technologies.

Throughout the semester, we have studied numerous communication theories. Their purpose is to help understand exactly what happens when we interact with others. We might not necessarily agree with all of the theories, but the idea is to develop tools to evaluate situations we may encounter. Often, when the theories are explained in the readings or lecture, it is beneficial to apply the concepts to a "real life" situation. Using this approach, I will use a situation that many of us have faced, or will face, and analyze it according to a particular communication theory.

Within daily communications, people judge conversations not only by the words spoken, but with the facial expressions during the conversation. However, a lot of today’s conversation is taken place over digital communication which hampers the subjective of the conversation. Typed conversations can be misconstrued and taken the wrong way since there are no visual references between the two people. As Gladwell states in his essay, people who

“Systematic research on the role of nonverbal behavior in social interaction has been common only in the past 20 to 25 years.”(Edinger and Patterson, 1983, p. 30).because that statement was published in 1983, it is apparent that the study of nonverbal behavior has been around for roughly 50 to 55 years. However, that is still a relatively recent amount of time compared to research in other science fields such as chemistry or biology. Despite the fact that this field is relatively recent there are many theories about our interaction with others. This paper will discuss the nonverbal expectancy theory along with two other theories, and describe how these theories can work together.