“Do you see what I mean?” How a drunk-driving tweetstorm cast doubt on the solidity of the ‘signifier’

Communication code scheme
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Recently, I butted in on a tweetstream. A woman boasted about how she’d been worried about her drunk friend, and that she’d driven close behind her to make sure she got home safely. My retort was that if she was so concerned for her friend’s safety, why was the friend driving drunk? Why weren’t her car keys confiscated, with her ensconced safely in a cab?

Needless to say, things got heated. She was tweeting in the USA after a long hard night out drinking with her buddy. I was tweeting across numerous timezones fresh eyed, sitting in the morning sun in South Africa.

I softened my tone.

Let me rephrase that. In MY opinion, I softened my tone.

From where I was standing, I felt like I was offering the peace olive.

That’s not what she took out of my communication. All she could hear was the supercilious, snide, judgemental haranguing of some creep on the southern tip of a continent she couldn’t even stab at on a map.

I’ve since blocked her Twitter account. I have no interest in following the thoughts of a partygoing condoner of drunk driving.

But heck… What if we could have aligned our meanings? What if we could have shared access to our inner thoughts? We both tried. But with varying levels of skill and intent.

A fundamental in communication is verification that one’s message has indeed been delivered intact.

Because signifiers — the ‘carriers of signs’, the ‘deliverers of meaning’ — are slippery beasts, they shift, and are differently understood from person to person.

The trouble is that we tend to take our signifiers for granted. We don’t really think for a moment that the signifiers we use — our very words — might run the risk of being misunderstood. We are, after all, communicators, no? And signifiers are, after all, the pack mules of communication.

When I say the word ‘Love’, for instance, it is a signifier that carries a vast payload. So vast that it’s unlikely you’ll understand it the same way I do. I might be issuing it as a declarative verb. I might be INSTRUCTING you to go out and love!

You might have ‘heard’ a noun, a wishy washy, ‘Ah, love is such a joy.’ Or a vicious, ‘Love is disgusting, and causes pain and misery.’

As the sender of a message, I trust and pray that the message I THINK I’m sending is the same one you’re receiving.

There’s a fair amount of hard work we can do to try and encode our intent into a message. We can provide context. We can use logical thought progressions. We can ground our speech in practical, real-world examples. We can seek verification from those who receive our message.

But ultimately, no matter how skillfully we encode our messages, the slippery nature of signifiers always eludes us. Put simply… It is impossible for you and me to calibrate our understanding so that what I grasp in the privacy of my own head matches what YOU grasp. You may SAY you get my meaning. I may even AGREE that your summary of my meaning is indeed what I intended. But the signifiers we use are too slippery for certainty.

This puts pressure on our social media communications. As an avid Twitterer (or Tweeter, or twit, or whatever signifier you’d like to assign to the concept), I’m well aware of the power of the shifting signifier to cause great misunderstanding and anger.

Here’s the rub. In social media, we’re confined to conveying loads of info in very small channels. Twitter gives us 140 characters to convey our message. So we use ‘lowest common denominator’ words as our signifiers. We simplify our language to fit all of our meaning in. Which means that we lose richness. We dumb down. And even so, our basic words have so much slippage that we’re misunderstood.

I’ll try and summarize this post as a tweet:

‘@royblumenthal: D’ya understand what I think I said? And if so, could you lemme know what you think I said? Significant? And don’t drink’n'drive!’

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