I speak Spanish after having spent a couple of years on an LDS mission in Ecuador, and I was talking to a colleague of mine a couple of years ago who also spoke Spanish. He is more of a quiet, private type of person, but he commented that he noticed he was much more outgoing in Spanish, almost like he was a different person. I have noticed this with other people who speak a different language, who seem to be louder, quieter, more reserved or more flamboyant, depending on which language they are speaking.
I’ve never been able to figure out why that is the case.
I was reminded of this strange linguistic phenomenon today after reading a Wired article by Tony Long. In the article, Long discusses how relationships have changed because of technology. Ironically, coming from a Wired writer, he doesn’t think this change is good. He argues that while we might communicate more because of modern technologies, the strength or depth of our interaction is less. He believes:
It’s a paradox of the technology that even as the world shrinks, our actual communication skills are eroding. Instant communication encourages superficiality in the way we talk to each other. That’s because we really aren’t talking to each other. You have to look a person in the eye and speak in order to be doing that.
He goes on to explain how face-to-face apologies seem more heart-felt that rapidly sent emails, which he feels “trivializes the act of contrition.” He also discusses some studies indicating that we spend most of our days using technology for many tasks, including to communicate.
At the end of the article, he refers to a study, which quotes a Yahoo executive reporting that mothers (yes, I know, this is WAY too far removed from the primary source) said that they communicates better with their teenagers through IM because that’s the only way they WILL communicate with their parents.
It’s almost like these mothers describe their teens as being different people when communicating through technology. Face-to-face, he won’t talk. But on IM they will.
Do we, like these teenagers, have different personalities when we are communicating with technology, rather than F2F? Like when my friend who acts differently when speaking Spanish, I act differently when I communicate online. I think I am bolder, more confident, wittier (I hope), but more critical (unfortunately). My wife and I love to IM and have our funniest, laugh-out-loud kinds of discussions through IM (she also is wittier online!). In fact, a friend of mine teased me when I said that my wife and I do a lot of our communicating through IM. We talk F2F too, of course, but some of our most enjoyable conversations have been through instant messaging.
And the best part is those wonderful conversations can be archived!
I’ve heard similar things happen when people participate in Second Life or MMOG online games—they take on a different personality from their “real” one. Why do we act differently online? I don’t know, but I think it’d be an interesting research agenda to try and find out!
Along a similar vein, Robert Putnam of Harvard recently spoke at BYU and discussed how social connections are in decline. But there’s a ray of hope: He said this has happened before, after the Industrial Revolution, and people found new ways of forming connections. He encouraged the BYU students to create new methods for connecting to others in our modern society.
And what better way to do THAT than through technology?
Hi Rick,
You may want to check out some of the literature for sociology and (more close to home) situated learning. You’ll find a lot of really cool stuff about how the concept of personal identity is wrapped up very tightly with one’s environment. In other words, you are a different person when you are speaking Spanish, using IM to communicate, etc. In fact, you’re a different person at work than you are at school than you are at home than you are at church. To make a random Seinfeld reference, there really was a “relationship George” and a “independent George,” and bringing the two together really would have killed independent George.
Hi Jason! Yes, you’re right. I’m actually just reading that section of Etienne Wenger’s 2002 Communities of Practice book where he talks about negotiating identities and how identities vary depending on the community of practice, and since we are all engaged in multiple communities, we have multiple identities that we negotiate into one grand “general” identity. I think this would be more interesting to study. In fact, I was thinking it might be interesting to look at “purposive” identity formation. In other words, can I enter a community with the goal of developing a certain kind of identity, or character, and then leverage the community to attain this? Anyway, it’s something I’m thinking about more right now.