Learning Emotional Languages

Day 13, Friday 30th March 2018

My brother (l) and I (r), c.1980. Communicating never came easily.

Currently, I’m researching Instagram and the effect it has on our health and diet, as part of my Food Policy MSc. There’s a fascinating body of work studying the effects of social media and how we react, or interact, with it. Yesterday’s stand-out quote highlighted a survey in which many school children indicated they felt more ‘natural’ interacting online, than they did in real-life interactions.

This really stumped me, because it contains a little paradox. Smartphones, laptops, iPads or whatever digital devices can be used for communicating, are all artificial, digital devices, none of them are ‘natural’. Yet, these contructed environments, which have been carefully developed and managed, feel more natural to many children. They find the unnatural environment most natural.

Sadly, these arenas will always be deficient in conveying true, honest, vulnerable emotional connection. Writing an e-mail, whether you have the emotional rapport of Dostoevsky or the clarity of Wordsworth, will never quite be the same as talking to someone.

Yet, it’s in this restricted, artificial environment that children feel most natural. It’s also been noted that there is a trend toward communicating without words, using memes, gifs and emojis to create a form of language that eschews most…