The dangers of electronic communications

Just a few hours ago, my beloved cell group leader messaged me on MSN to say hello. I happened to be chatting with another cell member, and was typing pretty fast. (I'm actually terrible at typing quickly...), so in my haste to respond, i had typed 'hello' and typed the 'Enter' key a little too fast (reflex action, maybe.. ) and the letter 'o' at the end didn't go out with the first line of text.

DISASTER~!!! You know what that would spell right? It spelt 'Hell'... Managed to rectify the mistake, but it then reminds me of a lecture i had in university for 'Internet Communications Strategies'.Electronic communication is so unlike our normal face-to-face communication, where our facial/body expressions can give a more accurate picture of what we are trying to convey.Or written communications, whereby we can still get a shot at retrieving our messages as long as it has not been physically handed to the receipient, whether intended or unintended.

Electronic communications like Email or instant messaging is so different. Once the message is sent, how the receipient interprets it is entirely out of our hands.

I mean, in my case, you would easily have brushed off the response as a joke, cos you can't possible (or rather, logically) respond to a "hello" with a smile accompanied with "Hell". Imagine how 'off' that would be?

More discussion to follow.

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