At a conference, a colleague told an interesting story about nonverbal communication in mediated contexts. She asked her students to submit their assignments via e-mail by midnight on the date they were due. At 1:00 A.M., she received a frantic note from her student, Aaron, explaining that a computer malfunction had prevented him from sending his speech outline until then. As Aaron typically provided quality work and never missed deadlines, our colleague was not concerned and did not intend to penalize him. So she simply wrote back “Got it” to quickly reassure him that she had received his outline. When she later saw Aaron in class, he said her short response made him worried that she was annoyed about his lateness. “If you had used a smiley face, I would have known what you meant,” Aaron said.

When you speak with someone face to face, you’ve got a number of nonverbal codes at your disposal. Even on the phone, where you have no visual cues, you can use paralinguistic cues (vocal tone, rate, pitch, volume, sighs) to offer information. But when you send an e-mail, IM, or text message, many of the nonverbal channels you rely on (eye contact, paralanguage, and so on) are unavailable. However, people have developed a series of creative substitutions for nonverbal cues: capital letters to indicate shouting; creative use of font sizes, colors, and typefaces to provide emphasis; random punctuation (#@*&!) to substitute for obscenities; and animations, figures, diagrams, and pictures to add visuals to messages (Gayomali, 2013). Punctuation (or the lack of it) can help readers “hear” the intonation of what is being said (many people say that they “hear” their friend’s texts or posts in that friend’s “voice”).

As Aaron noted in our example, some individuals expect others to use emoticons in mediated texts to help clarify meaning—whether to express emotion or to signal that something we say is a joke (Walther, 2006). Emoticons can also strengthen the intensity of a message, add ambiguity (was that really a joke?), or indicate sarcasm (Derks, Bos, & von Grumbkow, 2008). One study in Japan found that college students use positive emoticons as a “flame deterrent”—to try to prevent emotional misunderstandings that might upset others (Kato, Kato, & Scott, 2009). Since we can’t hear voice inflection or see facial expressions in many mediated situations, effective use of the keyboard and computer graphics can help to create a sense of nonverbal immediacy. This can be particularly useful in relationship formation and maintenance; for example, a dating Web site that used avatars to restore nonverbal cues improved perceptions of the effectiveness of online interaction so that participants exchanged more information and had a stronger desire to pursue a relationship (Kotlyar & Ariely, 2013).