Is WhatsApp affecting the quality of communication?
In our current society we know that we are fully immersed in the technological era, the virtual world and remote communications. The "face to face" contact is becoming obsolete and is being replaced at an astounding speed by contact through social networks such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and other applications and networks that allow us to have conversations without moving from our home.
A communication that is changing ... inevitably
Undoubtedly, the number of advantages at a practical level and speed of new technologies but ... Does this type of virtual contact affect communication? Does it interfere in some aspect, perhaps it hinders it? Or on the contrary, is it equally effective in all its aspects compared to "live" communication?
To start debating this issue, we must bear in mind that the communication is based on three aspects , the consecutive act, ilocutivo Y perlocutionary. In this way the experts refer to the act consisting in saying something, the intention or purpose of the speaker and the effects or consequences produced from it, 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 affirms that Exact transcription of speech to written language or reading 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 model of writing itself does not represent this capacity.
Therefore, based on this theory, virtual communication would maintain, in effect, the act of speech and the perlocutionary. But, what about the illocutionary act? A prori, no.
WhatsApp and the different forms of online communication exclude the illocutionary act
Many aspects that would be lost in written communication are included in speech communication. As the prosody, which would encompass a large number of relevant communicative aspects, such as the tone and height of the voice used (more acute may indicate nervousness and high may mean discontent), the accent and intonation used.
And going even further, in the case of being "face to face" speech communication, with respect to virtual communication, we would be losing all the information of the nonverbal type . See where he directs the look, movement and body posture, gestures, facial expression ... etc.
More differences and peculiarities 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 your personality, the subjective perceptions about it ... etc.
All this leads to a series of expectations, to perceive 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 mentioned before, its illocutionary act.
Conclusions and reflections
Given all the above, could we conclude that virtual communication is the same as face to face speech? Of course, no. But it would not be wise 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 fact, this very important aspect of communication depends to a large extent on many factors. For example, degree of knowledge of the other person, passing through the level of writing and the skill in the written expression of the interlocutors, even by the level of written comprehension of the receiver. In addition, it should be taken into account that virtual communication applications incorporate a wide repertoire of emoticons, stickers and sounds through which they can supply, with all the logical limitations, this type of illocutionary understanding that theoretically would be excluded in this type of communication 2.0.
