Last night was the commonwealth games opening and one of my friends in both real life and Facebook put up a status about the opening ceremony and her other friend commented on it. Here's some of the comments.
So I took a snapshot of that part of the conversation, which was light-hearted and tweeted it. I mentioned John Barrowman's official twitter on it and a few minutes later, he retweeted it and claimed I should "talk to the composer" and not blame him.
Following that, I got a whole hoard of mentions from his fans angrily tweeting me about how he couldn't have mentioned everywhere and they had apologised on the show. After a while I became I bit irritated and started swearing and ranting at those who were mentioning me. A few people did however realise that I meant it to be a joke and they showed their support.
What really bothers me is what would have happened if I'd put a "lol" after the original tweet? Would people have realised it was a joke then?
Back when I did higher English two years ago, my teacher told me, that we all lack confidence with our words nowadays and that's why we use emoticons, emojis and phrases like "lol" and "lmao", because we're scared that our words don't come across as we want them to.
I saw his point immediately. I can't count the times I've said something that sounded a bit harsh or mean to a friend and added a smiley face after it in order for them to see that I wasn't meaning to sound critical or horrid. Even with some of my tweets and Facebook statuses I'll add an emoji or something similar in order that people will take it light-heartedly or I'll tweet, "that was meant to be sarcastic."
I'm not saying we should take a stand and stop using emoticons, but I think it's time, we tried improving our confidence with word choice and language, especially on social media. Or we could stop taking twitter so seriously.
Rant over
bex_themonkey, out
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