Back in the day when I was running WebVideo4U one of the major selling points of our web conferencing software was that you could see all of the things you couldn't see over the phone.  You'd pick up peoples body language for instance or detect their facial expression.  Of course even the telephone has certain advantages over electronic communication.  You can pick up the tone of voice for instance.  A major line used in our sales attempts was that 93% of the meaning in what we say is actually non-verbal (of course this may not be entirely true, but y'know)

Despite these apparent shortcomings of course electronic communications have absolutely boomed since then.  If we're not sending 294 billion emails per day, we're tweeting or texting or using any of the plethora of other digital communications tools available to us.  Some new research has set out to explore just how effective this communication actually is.  What's interesting is that, they believe, our success is often massively over-estimated and that what we say online is often lost in translation.

The researchers conducted 5 experiments to determine how well what we say online is communicated.  Here are some of the main findings:

1. Non-written cues can seriously change the meaning of a sentance
2. Humour does not travel well digitally
3. Communicators are generally oblivious to #1 and #2

Turns out that when we write online we tend to assign the recipient of our message the same qualities as ourselves, therefore if we find something hilarious then of course the recipient will as well.  This over-confidence tends to occur more often in synchronous media where we tend to respond instinctively and our thinking brain does not have time to kick in and remind us that what we're saying may have the potential to be misconstrued.

If the research is on the money, the chances are we'll all ignore this and carry on as before, which given that the findings are not really all that new suggests this is really quite likely.  Don't say you haven't been warned though.