 I was sitting at the kitchen table with my husband, Dee, when I heard the sound of the ice cream man. Do you want a poke? I said, running around the kitchen, looking for coins. A poke, is it? A poke! From the poke man. I mean, whatever you're into. I didn't get my poke, but what I did get was weeks of teasing. You see, in Northern Ireland, a poke is an ice cream. It's fine. It's not showing. Okay. You like my story? I continue to my story about poke man. Everybody loves that one. That must be one of my... I did have some poke man music, but it hasn't worked either. I think I keep going. Is it working? Oh, there's me! This is my wedding day with the poke man. I was pretty awesome. So anyway, I didn't get my poke. Didn't have any money that day. See, in Northern Ireland, a poke is an ice cream. And a poke man is an ice cream man. And it's just one of the many ways that the Northern Irish dialect is really weird. It makes very little sense to anyone outside the country. It's a place where... Oh, this isn't working. Bik means mouth. Dead on means good. Wick means stupid. And Neb means nose. And in the 15 years since I've left Belfast, I've lost many of my idiomatic ways of speaking. Those are indicators of my culture, my nationality, and my class. But sometimes they still pop out, and I'm almost always scundered. So I'm telling you this story because it's 4 p.m. and day 2 of WordCamp Europe. You're all probably tired, and you're all definitely very, very hot. I'm tired. This is me. WordCamp Europe lighten being very tired. But also, so I thought you might all be ready for something a bit random and a bit of a story. But it also tells us something about the challenges of language. There's even challenges between two people who know each other very well and who both speak the same language. So when I was putting together this talk, I was trying to think of a good analogy or story that would really capture what I wanted to talk about today. And what came to mind was the story of Babel. It's a biblical story. I'm sure you all know it. In this story of Babel, everybody on earth still speaks the same language. They all find a settlement, and they decide to build a tar, and they want to make it really, really high. God sees the tar, and if you know your Old Testament, you know he was at that time pretty vengeful God. Not very happy about it. So what he does is he destroys the tar and he confines all of their tongues, so they speak different languages. He scatters them around the earth, and that tells us the story of language. So when I think about the internet, I think about what we're trying to do, that we're coming together again to build something new, to build the internet, to build communities on the internet. But unlike the people who built Babel, we all speak different languages. We all come from different cultures, and we all have different ways of being. And we rarely get the opportunity to speak to one another directly, face-to-face, as I'm doing right now. More than that, our speech is mediated through tools, which are themselves opinionated. They shape how we communicate. So today's talk, I want to think about how we communicate online. I want to think about the challenges. I want to think about some of the things that we might not instantly come to mind when we do something as simple as send a message. I'm not going to tell you how to communicate, but I want to think about the first steps that we need to take towards rebuilding our Babel. The media theorist Marshall McLean very famously wrote, the medium is the message. What he's saying is that what's at stake in the transmission of information is the medium itself. It's the form of the content. The medium, it's not just a vessel for transmitting information. It has an impact on how we think, how we live, on how we communicate, and on who we are. We live in a world with a multitude of media, each with its own ways of have a transmitting information that has an impact on how we think and how we relate. When I'm thinking about this, I like to conceptualize it in the way that architects and designers create spaces. They create restaurants with booths for intimacy. They create spaces like this, or I'm standing here and you're all up there listening. They create boardrooms that are glassy and have big long tables for formal meetings, nightclubs for dancing. Spaces shape conversations. They shape how we relate to one another. And online, it's no different. The communication tools that we use are not neutral. They shape how we communicate in very specific ways. They have an impact on our relationships with one another and on how we see ourselves. Do you ever find yourself just walking down the street and you're thinking about the best way to say something on Facebook? It's like a life event or maybe something funny has happened. You just lean away about what you're going to write. So we think about it in ourselves and what happens to us in a way that is performative. We're performing for other people. We edit and filter for the most likes. And each like gives us a little twitch of happiness. So the medium is the message. The form insinuates itself into the content and becomes part of it. It is the message. You see, maybe this is why I dislike pretty much everyone on Twitter. I even dislike myself on Twitter. It's this contraction of myself and of people I care about into this 140-character broadcast format. 140 characters that are repeatable and retweetable. When I used Twitter, I'm a bit like this. I'll start writing something and then I'll delete it and then I'll maybe write it again in a slightly different way, but it's never quite right and I start editing and changing and then it's too long and I have to delete things and then I have to have terrible grammar. But eventually I post it and then I wait. And then I wait. And then maybe I get a favorite and then maybe I get a retweet. So once I wrote something really funny on Twitter, and I thought it was funny, I thought it was really good, it was the perfect tweet. So I sent it out there and someone responded, slow clap. This isn't an idiom that I am familiar with. I was like, ah, I don't know what this is. Is this good or is this bad? So I do what we all do and I went to the urban dictionary to find out whether it was good or whether it was a bad. So the first definition said, it's a gradual building of applause, generally starting with one person clapping slowly and ending with an enthusiastic standing ovation. It generally shows approval for an underdog going to come from behind victory or after losing with pride intact. Yeah, that sounds pretty good. I would say that that means I'm funny. But the third definition said an insult used to make fun of. Was I funny? Am I not funny? So can anyone tell me? I was really confused. The tweet itself is not stuck with me. I have no idea what it was, but the feeling has. So I'm sorry to go off into tangents into my anxieties, but my point is that the medium is the message. It's not what I say on Twitter that matters. The content of that tweet, it doesn't matter, it has no bearing. What's at stake is how it changes how. I think and how I am. It makes me into someone who is anxious and someone who's uncertain, and the medium turns people who I love into people that I find annoying. Our tools force us to communicate in different ways. We are shoehorned into technological idioms. They're diaries of the past that people used to write in their diaries and they were spaces for introspection. We turned inwards and thought about things and reflected on them, but today we turn out. We perform. We perform on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, on Snapchat, or whatever. And we self-select the best of ourselves, the side that we want to show. When we use something like Slack, it's a great space for togetherness. It's an online shared space for companies, for teams, for groups, and even for open source projects. And while it's great, and I love it, and I use it every day and have a ton of different teams, it also promotes simultaneous back-channeling. So you may have a room where the main conversation is happening, but there could be multiple others going on at the same time, and there are all of these hidden layers of communication, and you never really know where the actual conversation is happening. Which just doesn't happen when you get people in a room and you make them talk. So I read this book recently by Sherry Turkle. It's called Reclaiming Conversation. In it, she writes about a school that she did some research in in the United States. The children are distracted, they find it difficult to concentrate, and they're not developing normal capacities for empathy. She writes about two children in particular. Louise's father has committed suicide, and he relies on his older sister, Winita, at school. Turkle writes, One day, Anna, a classmate of Louise's, becomes irritated that he interrupted her in the lunchroom when she was trying to talk to Winita. The next day, the school is in an uproar. Anna has posted on Facebook. I hope Louise ends up just the way his father did. The headmaster calls Anna into his office. He says he was steaming, trying to stay in control, smoke was coming out my ears, and he asks Anna, why? Why would you do this? And Anna has an answer ready. It was just on Facebook. The medium of the internet creates a barrier between me and you. It closes down any space for empathy. Anna saw Louise as an object. Anna saw Louise as an object. She had no conception that something written on the internet, something shared on Facebook, could cause real pain. On the internet, when we communicate, we lose the things we need for empathy. We lose tone of voice. We lose facial expressions. We lose body language. It's very easy to treat one another as objects. You just have to look at comment threads like the Guardian comments are free, numerous other comments read online. Look at social media to see how people treat one another. They're comfortable saying things that they would never say in person. Safe behind a screen. They make others feel objectified, victimized, and unsafe. There have been studies that show a connection between low eye contact in children and psychopathy. With its absence of eye contact, is it any surprise that so many people online lack empathy? We can see it in our own community. You can see it in comment threads on various WordPress news sites. You can see it happening on Twitter. There are people who thrive on the protection of the screen. It lets me insult you without ever having to look you in the eye and see the pain that I've caused. In the absence of body language and eye contact, we still... But what we're left with is bare text. And the speaker or writers in our case, they were left to embellish the text. It's no, a simple negative. No, definitely not. No, definitely not. How could you ask? No, not quite what I'm saying. No. No, that's a bit passive-aggressive. No! A moan or expression of dismay. We all do our best, but we still have to rely on the veracity or truthfulness of the person who we're talking to. Text makes it very easy to disassemble. Someone says, Someone says, I'm fine, smiley face, but if you're standing in front of them, it may be it's different. Maybe by making eye contact with them or seeing them avoid your eye contact, maybe by seeing the shape of their body, you'd realize it was different, that they weren't fine at all. We can't rely on text to give us all we need. We do do our best, though. And to help us out, we've created a new language. Well, it's not really a language. It's more of a way of conveying meaning. Emoji. So in 2015, the Oxford English Dictionary named this emoji, Faced with Tears of Joy, to be word of the year. And emoji is word of the year. Wow. They said it best reflected the ethos, mood and preconceptions of 2015. I use a lot of emoji. My text is full of them, especially in Slack. I love them. My favorites are this one, which is Prey, which I use for a thank you. Thumbs up, which I've used like ever since I started using it on Skype. Ta-da! For a celebration. A sunrise for good morning. I also use sunset for good evening or good night. And this big cheesy grain emoji, which I'm using a lot at the minute. Emoji are everywhere. They're even in WordPress. But they're not without problems. A recent study by Group Lens at the University of Minnesota found that emoji, which we use to add nuance to our text, are often misconstrued. They had two different research questions. The first was the interpretation of emoji on the same platform, so whether that's Apple or Samsung, whatever. What they found is that people interpret the same emoji differently. The worst culprit is this one. Microsoft smiling face with open mouth and tightly closed eyes. The respondents were questioned about whether they saw this as positive or negative. 44% said it was negative. And 54% said it was positive. So there's absolutely no consensus. The same emoji can be misconstrued by different people, but it's even more complex than that. So emoji, if you know a lot about emoji, and I know a bit more than I, they're just unicode characters. So the unicode consortium provides a code and a name. So we have U plus 1F602, which is joy. 606, which is laughing. 60D, heart eyes. 610, neutral face. Okay, neutral face. So we get the unicode, but the platforms render them how they want. And each platform has its own style. So what you send on your iPhone will appear differently depending on your recipient's device. So the meaning changes depending on the way the emoji is rendered. The worst culprit is grinning face with smiling eyes. This big cheesy grin, which is one of my favorites. When you view it on smaller screens, you do lose some of the definition in the eyes and it can look like grimacing face, which is definitely negative. On Google, it's this stupid empty grin, which I hate. I hate seeing it in my Gmail. It makes me really annoyed. On LG, this guy is really bright and happy about being alive. And Samsung, he's so happy he can't stop laughing. And for me, Microsoft looks like, you know that awkward grin that people have when you point a camera at them and they're like, oh my God, I hear that guy. But the Apple emoji is the most troublesome as it is construed as both positive and negative. So when an Apple user sends a mildly negative emoji to someone using another platform, it is rendered as positive. People also use different words in describing the same emoji on different platforms. It's when it's person raising hands and celebration, which on Apple is the words for hand and celebrate. Google, stop, clap. Microsoft, this weird great alien guy. I know, what is this? I don't understand. That's exciting and high. Samsung is exciting, happy. And LG is praise and hand. So across Google and LG, it's not clear whether someone is giving you praise or telling you to stop. And finally, sleeping face, which definitely looks sleepy on most platforms, but on Microsoft just looks unimpressed. I know, seriously. So when we try to add nuance to our text, when we try to communicate effectively, when we try to create a space for empathy, our tools get in the way. There's more misinterpretation. And what you say might not be what you intend. So to finish this presentation, I was going to talk about some of the things that I learned working on a book about the story of WordPress, about how communication and miscommunication have impacted the project, which they have, but I wanted to talk about something else instead, something that I've been thinking about very much in the past two days, and it's about online communication, but it's about one of its tricks, about one of its pitfalls. It's about how we negotiate the relationship between communicating online and offline, and it's something that matters very, very much to me. The internet is an echo chamber. We may self-disselect the best of ourselves to put on there, but we also select the people that we follow, the people that we're friends with, the blogs that we read, and the communities we participate in. It's very easy to be lulled into the assumption that everyone in the world agrees with us, and we're shocked when they don't. I tried very hard yesterday to come up with 140 characters to post on Twitter about how I felt about the results of yesterday's UK referendum, but there are absolutely no words to capture how devastated I am. And now I watch as my friends online feel equal amounts of hurt, upset, betrayal, and devastation. There are no emoji for this. If we spend all of our time communicating with people online, with people who mostly agree with us, we assume that they make up the rest of the world too. When the UK voted on Thursday to leave the European Union, it became clear how hollow those assumptions are. Liking something on Facebook is not a political act, nor is it retweeted, nor is sharing a meme. They're worse than nothing. We're lulled into thinking we're taking action when we're doing nothing at all. These things just circulate around in the echo chamber having no impact on the actual real world. And I'm feeling immensely sad today, but I also feel very ashamed. Ashamed that I didn't do more and that I didn't have the foresight to do it earlier. We live in very troubled times, and if we are really serious about building this virtual world that we are all so passionate about, we need to get serious about what we have, about protecting what we have offline. We need to get out of this bubble. We need to communicate with people who aren't online, but who are influenced by a pernicious media with its own agenda. We need to talk, we need to listen, and we need to have empathy. We need to be more than this virtual world. We need to look outwards, because if we don't, we build on very shaky foundations. Thank you.