Human Adaptation to Technological Constraints

In the world of online chatting, users have always found ways to display their meaning despite the constricting medium of text-only chatting.  This can be seen in such inventions as the emoticon to display emotion.  Without the ability to employ tone of voice or facial expressions, the emoticon provided a means for one person to convey an exact emotion to the other.  Happy as :-). Sad as :-(. Or worried as :-/.  The evolution of emoticons is so extensive one could probably do a dissertation on it.

In addition to an inability to communicate an exact emotion, the text-only medium lacks a means to directly represent an action.  This was quickly remedied, however, by the development of textual indicators for actions.  When a user wanted to indicate that a verb was an action, he or she would encapsulate it within two asterisks:

Hope you feel better *hug*

When reading someone else’s chats, seeing a word with asterisks around it triggered the reader’s mind to treat it as an action.  Thus it was now possible to *hug* someone, *kiss* the girlfriend, or *cough* to indicate a pun.

In the constantly changing world of technology, however, things… constantly change.  Recent years have seen a large increase in the number of people using the GMail chat service instead of traditional Instant Messaging services such as AOL or Yahoo! IM.  One of the characteristics of GMail’s service is that the interface and text is very simple.  While other messaging tools have extensive options for formatting the text to your taste, GMail provides no obvious way to do this.

To give users a few options, however, GMail has included the ability to bold and italicize text.  This is accomplished by surrounding bold text with asterisks (*bold* -> bold) and italicized text with underscores (_italics_ -> italics).¹  While this solution is slick, if not widely known, it does present one serious problem: any words that are surrounded by asterisks to indicate action now become bold.

Users had to figure out what to do with action words when using GMail.  Two courses of action became immediately apparent:

1. Surround the action word with double asterisks.  This allows for the second pair of asterisks to appear because they exist within the first.  **bold** becomes *bold*, and the action word retains its traditional markings.
2. Continue to use single asterisks and allow the GMail chat program to translate them into the bold text.  Thus a user may write:

Hope you feel better *hug*

But this would produce:

Hope you feel better hug

While the first option clearly maintains continuity with past practice, users, like water, always seek the easiest course.  Thus it is not uncommon to see a user marking an action word with single asterisks and accepting the translation into bold.

Here the adaptation of human thought to technological constraints (in this case the new constraint of having text marked with asterisks become bold) is particularly fascinating.  Where users used to read a word marked with asterisks (*hug*) as an action, now they read a bolded word (hug) as an action.  Thus the trigger mechanism for indicating an action changes from an asterisk to bold.

Whether or not this will become a widely adopted understanding is still questionable, but it is entirely possible that it could be the next step in chat evolution.  All because humans constantly adapt to the world around them, including technological change.

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1. Oddly, Microsoft Office 2007 seems to have adopted this same markup structure when composing emails in Outlook, with one problem.  The program bolds or italicizes the words without removing the markers.  Thus *bold* becomes *bold* and _italics_ becomes _italics_.  This implementation makes very little sense, as there is little reason the user would want both the markup and the effect.

Tags: adaptation, chat, constraints, human