So let’s talk about connections. Forming ties with other people can often seem daunting.
But it’s not always the same: when you have things in common with somebody, it’s usually
easier to connect with them than if you’re from really different backgrounds. Luckily,
we have all kinds of ways to make sense of each other, and to build shared experience
as we go along. I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is the Ling Space.
When we have a conversation, there’s a lot going on other than just words. Our body language
and intonation, our emoji and CAPS LOCK, all of these are cues that help the person we’re
talking with get a more accurate feel for what we mean. We also assume people are using
basic communicative maxims that are common across languages, like, that what the other
person is saying is true, and is relevant to the conversation at hand.
But there’s an entire undercurrent of communicative connection that’s going on even beyond those
rules, linking our minds through shared experience. Maybe you’ve noticed that within families,
or tight groups of friends, or even specific fields or fandoms, words can take on special
meanings, and conversations can even skip some words entirely. You can end up with an
exchange that’s pretty opaque to an onlooker who’s not part of the community. Like, for example:
So what happened with the thing? Well, you know, Steiner was there, so.
Ouch. Building still standing?
That can be pretty obtuse, unless you happen to share the knowledge that Steiner is the
cousin of the person you’re talking to, and the two vehemently don’t get along.
All this underlying knowledge, the stuff conversation partners have that allows them to assume things,
is called common ground. And it’s super useful - it makes communication easier, letting
you skip explanations and get right to the good stuff. The more we can assume, the
less effort we need to put into the conversation!
We like common ground so much that we naturally use our communicative strategies to build
more of it. A huge, almost essential part of that process is conversational feedback.
When you talk with someone, there’s usually a back-and-forth development of shared reference
and vocabulary, happening in real time. And this is something you’ll see across languages -
like, the first speaker says something, and the other might nod or say “uh-huh”
or “hai”, or do some other communicative gesture to show that they’re following.
These are called backchannel responses, like a stream of low-key information returning
back to the speaker from the listener.
Of course, another convenient way to have stuff in common is to like, physically be
in the same room with somebody. You can skip a lot of words if you can just point to something.
Like if a DJ has some nice blue hair, and you want to describe for your friend the exact
shade, you can say something like “Blue, but not that blue,” if there’s a particularly
vivid swimming pool nearby.
But common visual information isn’t the only kind of mutual knowledge you can have.
There’s a lot that just having a shared history can bring to the table. This is especially
common with families and old friends, or just being members of the same community. Let’s
say that I wanted to describe that same blue to our graphics team. I might tell them “Blue,
but not Adele blue,” referring to the favourite hue of our director Adele.
If I say something like “Adele blue”, they’ll get it, because they know her and
her colour preferences. But you can’t guess which shade I mean, and if I show you, you
probably will have a different name for it - or no name at all. That kind of thing is true
for any kind of group. When you’re a member of a defined community, that tends to come
with its own vocabulary and conversational norms. Like, the technical jargon you might
have as a pharmacist makes information exchange easy with your pharmacist friends, but you
wouldn’t try using it with a police officer.
Research on common ground started in the 80s, and it focused mostly on face to-face communication.
Thanks to the internet, though, what makes up a community is being redefined. You can
have that common ground connection with someone you’ve never met before, anywhere around
the world, from Mexico City to Mumbai. I mean, you all know what Adele blue is now. So with
so many of our important relationships today happening over long distances, or even through text,
you could wonder whether the face-to-face rules even still apply.
Well, we’ll get to some differences in a bit, but it turns out we don’t need to change that much.
You do get less backchannel communication, but most of us still have a tendency to sit
and wait for our friends’ next emoji before finishing our story. And maybe you can’t
physically point to something while messaging and expect your friend in another city to
see it. But if you think of online interactions as taking place in a shared virtual space,
there’s a lot of common ground there you can use.
One type of common ground that’s become a major part of the way we communicate on
the internet is memes. Now, the idea of a meme isn’t that new - it predates widespread
use of the internet, the term having been coined by Richard Dawkins in the 1970s. At
its core, a meme is any kind of idea or behaviour that spreads from person to person. But these
days, when most people say “meme”, the common ground we share about that word usually
evokes double rainbows and cute cats.
But common ground is exactly where memes are, it’s how they thrive. Things become memes
through being passed around as a common cultural referent: in social media, blogs, email, and more.
But memes are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to common ground on the internet.
Now that we don’t need to see each other to form bonds, we’re developing new norms
for communication, ways of sharing ideas that are born from sharing a virtual space. A growing
amount of research is being done not only on things like memes and emoji, but also the
syntax and grammar and semantics of how people talk online.
After all, it’s not just image macros and cultural references that can be used as shortcuts
to conversational clarity. Turns of phrase themselves can carry meaning too. One example
that’s pretty common is the phrase “I can’t even”. Now, usually, the adverb ‘even’
would need a verb after it to be grammatical, like “I can’t even speak German” or
“I can’t even deal with that guy”. But drop the verb phrase, and you’ve got something
that stands on its own to describe exasperation or being unable to express the intensity of
your feelings.
And, throw a new phrase in a language and humans run with it, so we don’t only get
“I can’t even”. We get “how do I even,” or “I’ve lost all ability to even”,
or “maybe I’ll even tomorrow”. Similarly, there’s nothing new about the word “nope”,
but a whole concept has sprung up beyond its literal meaning. Nope implies this whole common
ground of fleeing from a situation you would rather not be in, like: “Will noped right
out of there”, or “that whole building is crawling with nope”, or “oh look, it’s nope o'clock."
So on the internet, changing the way that you write your words can paint a picture of how you
feel. Like for example, you could just say that something you found tiny and adorable,
like a kitten, was small. But when small just doesn’t cut it, you can make the word itself
smaller and cuter. Now the littlest fluffiest babiest kitten, oh, it is so smol. If you’ve
seen smol used around the internet, it’s become part of the common ground you share
with your peers who have too. And so by saying smol, you’re not just referring to something’s
size, you're echoing all the adorableness that’s come before.
Whether we’re talking in person or online, we use all the tools at our disposal to communicate.
We point and build new phrases and even just make little acknowledgments that the person
talking is getting through to us. We draw on everything we can to create a space for
ourselves to understand each other. And that’s sensible.
So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week. If you shared our mutual knowledge,
you learned that there’s a bunch of ways you can achieve common ground with your conversation
partners; that even if you don’t have too much in common with the person you’re talking
to initially, you can use communicative strategies to build a common ground; and that shared
culture, be it online or off, can carry a lot of meaning.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost,
and it’s written by both of us. Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our production assistant
is Stephan Hurtubise, our music is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE.
We’re down in the comments below, or you can bring the discussion back over to our
website, where we'll have some extra material on this topic. And while you’re there, check
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