Hell, they don’t, I will. In this essay I will discuss how the textual and meme-based forms of aizuchi are not only a sign of our changing methods of communication with the advent of technology, but a particular advantage to those who have problems deriving shades of meaning from vocal tone or facial expression, and arguments made against textual and meme-based forms of aizuchi are speaking from a platform of ableism.
Technology has made a lot of changes in the way we communicate. When it’s face-to-face, we can get away with nods, that little ‘yeah, good point’ purse of the lips, raised eyebrows, that face-scrunch that just says ‘doubt’ … facial expressions, in short; really complex ones, often with an aural component. We read more from those than we realise, but at their base level, they show that we’re not only hearing the noises and nodding in the right places, but listening.
Enter the telephone. Suddenly a speaker can’t see where their conversational companion’s eyes are pointing, what they’re doing with their hands, what their posture’s like, or even if there’s someone on the other end of this bit of plastic they’re talking into. I imagine that aural aizuchi became common to the point of being considered a conversational necessity with the telephone, because when telecommunications technology was in its infancy, back in the days of party lines, it was shaky and unreliable (think Comcast) and there was every chance that your call could be disconnected without realising it. So interjecting with aural cues helped when it came to building trust in the communications medium that was the telephone.
When the internet turned up, it took away even the aural component, and the problem that arose with the telephone repeated itself on a grander scale. Not only could someone not necessarily be sure that someone was paying attention (yes, they might be online, but are they looking at the chat box or did they alt-tab out?), but any exchange was stripped of emotional content. The conversational cue words used to denote attention being paid can come across as sarcastic, dismissive or overly abrupt when stripped down to words on a screen, without the nuance lent to it by vocal tone and facial expression.
The solution? Create a whole new dialect, combining pictures and text to capitalise on a shared cultural foundation. If you’ve ever seen the ST:TNG episode “Darmok”, it’s a bit like that. There are a lot of different cultural cue points (thus “There’s a horse loose in a hospital!” instead of “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra”), and we abbreviate a lot, but in principle, it’s the same. We communicate in metaphor, allowing our shared cultural background carry the emotional nuance that’s lacking in text alone.
What seldom gets brought up is how this has helped those who have issues parsing facial expressions. For some people, parsing all but the most basic facial expressions is a hit-and-miss exercise requiring a lot of work, and vocal tone hits them the same way. When we started communicating online in what I can only call a memetic dialect, we started conveying concrete, text-proven emotional context in our conversations. This must have been a relief for anyone who has difficulties reading facial expressions and vocal tones, since people can lie about what’s going on behind their face but an established cultural foundation at least pins down what their conversational partner or partners meant to convey. Also consider: when this memetic dialect came into use in face-to-face conversation, it gave a solid emotional context to certain words that can be referenced outside of the forum-and-text-chat medium. In short - words and phrases mean things and, once that meaning has been established, it carries over into whatever mode of conversation is in use.
The fact that we as a culture created a memetic dialect to effectively communicate emotional context via a medium entirely stripped of the standard emotional cues is incredible, and I honestly believe that anyone who takes issue with “same” or “mood” used in text conversation (or even verbally, since the thing about memetic anything is that it spreads; that’s the point of a meme) should probably be obliged to analyse their own speech for useless words. At least that might help make the point that everyone uses filler words or aizuchi, but modern forms of it actually make sense not only in terms of adapting to suit a medium, but also adapting to be equitable to those who may have issues with emotional context in other sources.
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