Actually, I do blame the telephone for many an unkind word and misunderstanding!
Telephone calls often interrupt other activities at the home of the receiving party - a fact which the caller doesn't always immediately recognize.
The receiving party might be in the midst of a domestic dispute of his own - dealing with unruly children or an angry spouse - and then the call comes.
Or, contrariwise, the call comes during an "intimate" moment in the bathroom or the bedroom.
In both scenarios, the receiving party is already feeling "put upon."
Then, with telephone calls (as opposed to personal visits), the participants can't see each other's faces. Thus, a casual joke may be misinterpreted as a cutting remark, a helpful suggestion as an intrusive criticism.
Of course, compared with the Internet, there is less chance of the altercation then spreading like wildfire.
Regards,
That’s kind of quibbly, if one has an answering machine or voicemail....
There might be something wrong with any medium that allows us to perceive beyond what we developed with. Maybe if we don’t have 100,000 years to ease into it like cave paintings it just isn’t going to be something our brains are going to handle.
Text messages are the worst for misinterpreting meaning and missing nuance. How long have we had the recordable written word? But somehow internet texting to another person becomes this hard thing to parse.
Freegards