Scowling at my chat window

I think I have finally settled on the surest way to create conflict in all but the most longstanding interpersonal relationships: spend time talking on online chat applications.

I would suspect that the rise in popularity of chat--for everything from work conversations to meeting that special someone to catching up with the grandkids--has been accompanied by a rise in interpersonal conflict and misunderstandings.

And why not? Online chat combines the worst of two primary human communication vehicles. It offers the immediacy, and therefore lack of forethought, of face-to-face conversation. It offers the lack of facial expression, intonation and body language of the written word. Shake those shortcomings with a tendency to misspell things and forgo punctuation and you have a nasty swill.

I say all these things from the perspective of someone who is a Gmail and Facebook chat addict. My best friend lives in another town. She and I talk nearly every day on chat. And we seldom have misunderstandings. That said, we both think a lot alike and know each other very well. I don't need to see her face or hear her voice to understand what she means. And it's OK if she says exactly what she is thinking. That's what you are supposed to do with close friends.

But put the inadequacies of the vehicle to test with someone you don't know well and it's a bloody minefield. I've experienced mild to severe examples of this in the last few months and am starting to get irritated as all get out, both at myself and others.

If human relationships, both personal and professional, are going to survive this means of communication, we all will need to tweak our mindset a little. We all need to work harder at giving others the benefit of the doubt. We need to stop the rapid-fire back and forth typing and clarify rather than making assumptions. We need to be mindful of the possibility that the person we are chatting with may not "read" our conversation in the same way we intended it to be delivered. Holding a chat conversation to the same standard as either the spoken interchange or e-mail exchange is unfair to all involved and serves only to create frustration.

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