Non-verbal communication. We all use it, mostly without being conscious that we are using it. Your body language might betray your emotions when you are trying to hide them. It might reveal the fact that you are lying when you don't want people to know the truth. However, it might also come in very useful when you want to tell someone something which another person within hearing distance is not supposed to hear.
Non-verbal cues often tell you more about a person than verbal language. Not just body language, but also intonation is a very useful cue to tell what a person really means. For example, think about sarcasm. Without non-verbal cues, a person would just take your words literally. However, the intonation usually tells you whether a person uses sarcasm or not.
The importance of non-verbal communication implies a problem in recent life: communication through social media. More and more communication takes place via Hyves, Facebook or Twitter. Using these mediums, non-verbal cues are not visible. It is easy to type something on a social medium while you feel something completely else. Since your body language is not visible to the receiver, he will likely evaluate your words as truthful. The same holds for intonation. This is also not visible on social media, which means it is much harder to recognize sarcasm.
Another problem with social media, is that emotions are not visible. A small solution to this are smileys, which resemble your emotion. However, these smileys might not resemble your true emotion, but just the emotion you want other people to think you experience on a certain moment. Again, the absence of body language forms a problem.
We talked about the phenomenon with assistant professor Martijn Goudbeek. His expertise is in the field of emotions and non-verbal communication. We posed him the question: 'What influence does social media have on non-verbal communication?' His vision on this will be shown in the video below.
What is your opinion on this issue? Will non-verbal communication become less important through the use of social media, or will it eventually become more important again through webcams and comparable new technologies?
I think nonverbal communication will always be present in all sorts of communication efforts. As Paul Watzlawick famously said, "One cannot not communicate." It is important to understand that people will slowly find more effective ways to express emotion than emoticons. At the same time, maybe it can also be considered a good thing that we cannot communicate effectively via social media. That way we can understand that social media is just a mere temporary replacement for real, face-to-face communication.
BeantwoordenVerwijderenActually, on verbal and nonverbal it =CONCATENATE("";http://skywritingservice.com/blog/influence-of-social-media-on-our-everyday-life;"") influences a lot. I think we should be more aware of that, not just behaving it the way it goes, but like.. to chose who what we behave like.
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