Is WhatsApp affecting the quality of communication?

In our current society we well know that we are fully immersed in the technological age, the virtual world and remote communications. Face-to-face contact is becoming obsolete and it is being replaced at an astonishing speed by contact through social networks such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and other applications and networks that allow us to have conversations without leaving our home.

A communication that is changing... inevitably

There is no doubt the number of advantages at a practical level and speed of the new technologies but... Does this type of virtual contact affect communication? Does it interfere in any way, perhaps make it difficult? Or on the contrary, is it equally effective in all its aspects compared to “live” communication?

To start discussing this issue, it must be borne in mind that communication is based on three aspects, the speech act, ilocutive Y perlocutionary. In this way, experts refer to the act of saying something, the intention or purpose of the speaker and the effects or consequences produced from this, respectively.

Different channels, different communicative realities

In this sense, it is very interesting to know the contributions of the Canadian cognitive psychologist David R. Olson. This author has thoroughly investigated the relationship between written culture and thought. Among his main reflections, Olson states that exact transcription of speech into written or reading language is not possible. Its justification was based on the fact that, when passing from speech to reading, we lose the illocutionary capacity of language since the writing model itself does not represent this capacity.

Therefore, based on this theory, virtual communication would, in effect, maintain the locutionary and the perlocutionary act. But what about the illocutionary act? A prori, no.

WhatsApp and the different forms of online communication exclude the illocutionary act

Speech communication includes many aspects that would be lost in written communication. Just like the prosody, which would encompass a large number of relevant communicative aspects, such as voice tone and height employees (higher can denote nervousness and high can mean discontent), accent and intonation employee.

And going even further, in the case of being "face-to-face" speech communication, compared to the virtual one, we would be losing all non-verbal information. See where your gaze is directed, body movement and posture, gestures, facial expression... etc.

More differences and particularities of communication 2.0

Although on the other hand, It is not the same to communicate virtually with an unknown person than with a known person. In the latter case, a series of factors come into play, such as the experiences lived with that person, the knowledge in memory that you may have about their personality, subjective perceptions about her... etc.

All this leads to a series of expectations, perceiving the things he says knowing how to see "beyond" what he says and see how he says it, as far as possible. These aspects would lead us to be able to make certain inferences about what is the communicative intention of our interlocutor or, as I have already mentioned before, his illocutionary act.

Conclusions and reflections

Considering all the above, could we conclude that virtual communication is the same as face-to-face speech? Of course, no. But neither would it be sensible to consider that communication through new technologies should be sentenced and discarded from our lives.

The fact that online communication dispenses with the illocutionary act is a half-truth. In reality, this very important aspect of communication is highly dependent on many factors. For example, from degree of knowledge of the other person, passing through the level of writing and the ability in the written expression of the interlocutors, up to the level of written comprehension of the receiver. In addition, it should be noted that virtual communication applications incorporate a wide repertoire of emoticons, stickers and sounds through which it is possible to supply, with all logical limitations, this type of illocutionary understanding that theoretically would be excluded in this type of communication 2.0.