| October 1996 | http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1996/oct/mength.html |
Feeling Between the Lines, by Joyce Menges
Building a Theory
One early nonverbal communications researcher, Mark Knapp (1972), has made the following estimate: considering that the standard spoken sentence takes only about 2.5 seconds, the average person actually speaks words for a total of only 10 to 11 minutes daily. Given this, the verbal dialog portion of an interaction will carry less than 35% of the social meaning of any particular situation. More than 65% will be carried nonverbally (p. 12). Other researchers would, however, disagree. “In part, [intellectual confusion] stems from a lack of agreement on the boundary between verbal and nonverbal and the distinction between communicative and non- communicative behavior” (Harper 1978, p. 3). Still there is tacit agreement here; regardless of the terminology or the parameters, there is an extraverbal component to human communication. It is my argument that this also holds true for electronic communication.
Some have narrowed their investigations to one discrete
class of extraverbal cues. Nathan's (1986) work related to
clothing for example, most have organized their study of
nonverbals around one of two approaches, behavioral
categorization or functional analysis. Categories of nonverbal
behavior surveyed have included some combination of the
following: touching, proximity, orientation, appearance, body
movement (posture, head nods and gestures), eye behavior,
clothing, smell, taste, paralanguage, nongrammatical aspects of
speech such as tone, accent, speed volume, artifacts, and
environment (Barker , 1990; Druckman, 1982; Hinde, 1972; Knapp,
1972). Functional theorists have, on the other hand,
identified purposes for nonverbal communication which range
from simple schemes like Hinde’s (1972) three functions:
managing the immediate social situation, sustaining verbal
communication or replacing verbal communication, to more
complex conceptions such as Druckman's (1982) five functions
which include such purposes as "Indicates pre-articulate
feelings, provides clues to information processing, serving as
emphasis in persuasive appeals, facilitates deception or
holding back of information, and conveying subtle messages."
(p. 19) A more common list, first articulated by Knapp (1972;
see also Barker, 1990; Patterson, 1983) includes repeating,
contradicting, substituting, complementing, accenting, relating
and regulating. Mirroring the work of the face-to-face
theorists, I have sought to discover and describe extraverbal
devices and their function in text-based electronic
communication.
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