All of these involve language, but there's no reason for responses to be restricted to that.
For me, worst to best is:
Handwriting -> My handwriting is painful at the best of times, and becomes harder and harder to read the more I write. If I can at all avoid it, I do not use it. Its only advantage over verbal for me is that it can be referred to later.
Telephone/VOIP/Teamspeak/Ventrilo -> I always feel like I'm pushing myself to maintain a phone conversation. This has not always been true, but has been the case for several years. It's not a matter of anxiety (or not always a matter of anxiety) but a matter of cognitive discomfort, often leading into a headache. I mentioned in another post that I felt like I was pushing myself beyond what I am normally able to do to have a conversation over the phone, and I definitely need time afterward to decompress. It feels kind of like socializing with 2-3 people for a few hours. Also, verbal communication issues described in the next point.
Face to face verbal -> I do not like talking to people in general. I get similar cognitive discomfort to phone conversations but there seems to be less pressure generally to hold up a conversation when technology's not involved. With one person things go okay and if I stop talking at least the other person can see me, and thus there's perhaps less pressure to be verbally "present." Still, I find that it's so much easier for me to simply respond to what people say (filling in my side of the conversation with appropriate responses) than it is for me to say what I need to say. Actually speaking my mind takes far more effort, and is difficult to sustain with people who are quick to sidetrack into something else, and then it is very easy for me to just follow the sidetrack. A lot of the time (especially if two or more other people are involved), it's even easier to say nothing at all and let the conversation flow around me. The added pressure of not understanding facial expressions, body language, or nuances in spoken language (thus literal interpretations) only complicate matters.
The exception is, of course, talking about my interests, at which point I feel like I become verbally fluent and enthusiastic, but the conversation is not very reciprocal at all - I talk at people.
Text Chat -> If I keep it down to 1-2 people (separate conversations) this is easier than the above, and is slightly asynchronous, giving me the ability to process language more and not worry about nonverbal cues. I still tend toward literal usage and interpretations. As I add more people to chat with, it becomes more overloading and I start losing the ability to deal with individual conversations because I am processing multiple conversations. Further, some people have chat habits that are demanding and overloading. One particular that tends to push me hard is asking "huh?" or even just a ? when I've sent a long sentence or paragraph. I can't interpret this question at all - what part of what I said was confusing? Yet there are several people I've chatted with who do this. Another are people who send multiple short messages instead of longer messages. Or complain when I don't respond immediately to their messages.
I tend to accumulate people to chat with over time - I might start with 2-3, but end up with a dozen or more, and this is when the overloads really start happening, and when I end up shutting chat off entirely. This past time I was pretty surprised that, despite the fact that a lot of the chatting I do is pretty pleasant, I cut down my stress and overload levels significantly. I knew it was taking up a lot of energy, but I didn't realize it was having such an impact. Group chat can be even worse, as multiple people are in one conversation, and it can become difficult to even sustain a conversational thread with people changing the subject every time they hit enter or whatever.
Telephone, verbal, and chat can be turned completely upside down for me, too, if someone springs a surprise subject - especially an unpleasant one. If it's out of left field, all I can really do is fall back on scripts and hope I don't accidentally agree to something I disagree with, and maybe manage to process the whole thing afterward. These are hugely stressful for me.
Asynchronous Text (forums, e-mail, blogs) -> There's very little pressure to communicate at this point. I can read a post, process it at my speed, and provide more useful, substantial responses rather than feel pressured to give an immediate response that could have more to do with social scripts and memorized phrases than anything else. These three aren't the same, but I grouped them together because a lot of things are fairly similar about them for me.
Forums, blogs, mailing lists, etc. have the most potential pressure, as there are multiple people reading and responding to threads/posts, and a few careless comments can easily get a handful of people lining up for their pound of flesh before you have a chance to clarify yourself or back off from communicating something you may not have intended.
Private communications - PMs, personal e-mails are the least stressful for me, as there's only one other person involved, the conversation is asynchronous, I don't have to worry about nonverbal anything, I can process the exchange at my speed, and overall I feel like communication there is generally most productive. Admittedly, I can get a bit impulsive even here and rush off a reply that may not quite communicate what I want.
21 Mar 2011, 3:59 pm
