I do it in specific instances where I want to express a pause, like "that was....ok?" I also use it when I want what I'm saying to come off as annoyed. "The shipment was late, again..."
I actually worry about exclamation points because I use them like OPs image, but I always worry people take it as yelling or something lol
I think they have attention span problems or something like that. They can't wait while they are forming sentences, so while they think of something, they add ellipses to their message.
My autistic brain goes „WTF? Why would anyone do this?“ then proceeds to write incredibly long paragraphs with multiple statements wrapped into one, long sentence, using punctuation just to separate thoughts.
All this thoughtful and unambiguous use of punctuation builds in me the irrepressible temptation to foster uncertainty by ending this sentence with nothing but an emphasis
Kind of just more evidence that reducing human conversation into writing is reducing human communication to at most a handful of perceivable factors instead of the countless ways in which humans (and animals in general) communicate.
In other words, if it wasn’t already obvious the internet is corrosive to humanity.
The oldest written text I've found in three seconds of research in contained in this ancient meme, which is believed to have originated in the early days of the internet. So while it's not enough to disprove your claim, it seems to suggest that text and internet actually started roughly at the same time, possibly building on top of each other.
I meant to make a point about how the internet has made unedited written conversation far more prevalent in everyday life. Edited and peer-reviewed writing is different from the majority of what people read and write on a daily basis (including myself, because obviously my initial comment could’ve used more time in the oven)
Actually the internet supports audio and video. If anything that's evidence that newspapers, books, and really everything before TV and radio is corrosive to human communication. Well that and text based forums like this are corrosive.
Just because a medium isn't perfect doesn't make it corrosive. The problem here is the way human brains deal with things, not the things themselves. TV and video also cause loads of problems, because people treat them as too real. It's a balance really.
You’re right, but I’m confident enough in saying that most people don’t film videos or record themselves saying what they want to in order to engage online most of the time. I mean to say that dropping a written comment on a Facebook, Reddit, Lemmy, Xitter, etc. post makes it far more easy for people to try to infer meaning where there is none. I’m convinced that sort of indirection that the internet has made a much more common element in human discourse has greatly influenced the increase in political polarization.
For example, if someone posts “#ACAB,”someone who was shot by a cop for stealing a loaf of bread is likely to relate to it and assume that OP completely understands their plight, but someone whose parent or sibling is a cop will likely assume that OP is prejudiced and presumptive when in actuality OP was just posting their gut reaction to the movie 21 Bridges.
I guess I didn’t include everything I ought to have to make my point (which honestly is evidence for my point).
Books are generally speaking written over long periods of time and go through plenty of editing and revision while internet comments and posts, especially from dumbasses like me, are not.
No, limitations in communication aren’t good or bad they simply create new opportunities. The problem isn’t how much is lost in text, the real problem is that English is being frozen in place because of spellcheck and new slang/patterns can’t evolve to account for the limitations of texting so you have to hamfistedly do stuff like use exclamation points as much as possible without using them in a row.
Spellcheck fundamentally fucks with communication over text because it assumes language is this thing that can be done right, in a correct form, and that mediating force from an algorithm creates a huge distance between people that more natural organic conversation doesn’t.
I got a new job last year and I wasn't used to people using exclamation points so much. Sometimes I would think I did something wrong because it seemed like they were yelling angrily at me.