Laughing on the Back Channel

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A few years ago I was in a great seminar on new technologies where the leader was offering us more opportunities for creativity than I'd experienced in years. Back channelling was one of the options avaiiable at the event. The back channel had a constant flow of commentary from some of the wittiest people I've encountered. Pretty soon two conversations developed at the seminar, one live conversation that was intense and serious and exciting, and then the back channel that was hilarious, silent, and also (of course: it's part of the genre!) snarky. I loved both conversations but not the bifurcation of emotion that arose from the simul-talking and back-talking. People in the room were doing a lot of silent, texting "lol" but, in fact, no one in the room itself was actually Laughing Out Loud. If a someone standing in the doorway had observed the room without knowing about back channelling, she would have thought we were at a funeral. All the fun was reserved for the then relatively new technology of back channelling.

I was unsettled by the back channel diversion of wit at that time but I don't think I actually registered, back then, the front channel silence or the extreme disparity between the serious mood live and the jokey one texting. And I certainly, at that time, would not have realized the causal role that texting hilarity might have on lowering face-to-face hilarity. A few people would laugh in the room but most people were so intent on getting the first back channel witticism on line that it almost seemed as if the front channel was becoming a "straight man" for the back channel. Without appreciating the social psychology being produced by avid use of a new technology, I was still finding the social experience unsettling and unsatisfying, as if both conversations were deprived by the parallel conversations, rather than each being enhanced by the other. It reminded me, even then, of what in pre-verbal children is called "parallel play," simultaneous fun activity without much actual interaction between the children. Parallel play is a developmental stage, between the solipcism of earliest childhood and a sociality that develops around age three or four, where kids actually play together, learn to share, bond, interact, and enjoy being together more than they enjoy being by themselves. In other words, in our texting one another while seated around the same table, we were playing together like two year olds.

Tonight I happened to be reading the chapter on laughter in Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open (2004) and suddenly flashed back to that seminar and understood much more of what had happened there. I like Johnson's Emergence quite a lot so was eager to read his book on the neuroscience of everyday life. I don't agree with all of his evolutionary psychology--it's too fictionalized and non-evidential for my taste (as is much of the field in general)--but I'm impressed and intrigued by his thoughtful and complex readings of classic psychology experiments and I am a fan of anyone who can look at a brilliant experiment and see aspects of it missed even by those who constructed the experiment. (Readers of this blog know I dwell a lot on the mismatch between often ingenious experimental design and then reductionist conclusions, some of which seem tailored to granting agencies and far below the intelligence and subtlety of the experiments themselves. Johnson doesn't hesitate to draw his own conclusions from experiments he reports on.)

What caught my eye tonight was Johnson's account of a retreat he attended of twenty software communications designers where part of the conversation happened in f2f (face-to-face) and part on a back channel. The same pattern that evolved at my seminar some years ago happened among the software designers. Since his book came out in 2004, I am guessing the seminar he describes happened around the same time as the one I attended, where back channelling was still pretty new but also (significantly) where texting and twittering had not become a national obsession the way they are now. So some of his conclusions may be even more relevant to our texting culture today than it would have been five years ago.

What Johnson notes is that in some ways the lol silent wit on the back channel, in neurological terms, robbed the front channel meeting he attended of social bonding. A major function among primates of laughter is not response to funniness but lubrication of a social situation. Laughing also modifies brain chemistry, shooting good things like stress-reducing oxytocin into the brain. That's one reason why the person speaking laughs more than the person listening; the speaker's job is partly to lower the stress in a sociable encounter. (Good) bosses also initiate laughter more than employees for the same reason, teachers more than students. Laughter is about social interaction which is inevitably about status and implicit social rules. (NB: Most of these studies are based on Western culture with our highly socialized rules and hierarchies for who laughs first and who laughs longest and who laughs last. You can get yourself in trouble in any culture by not knowing status-based laugh-rules.)

LOL--when it really is out loud in a group setting--is a group harmonizer. There is a de-stressing effect that happens with group laughter that serves to calm hostility and aid communication. There were more actual jokes per minute because of the back channel at Johnson's retreat but Johnson's room--like the seminar room I was in a few years ago--was so eerily silent that people intuited the mood as hostile even when it wasn't supposed to be. If speakers laugh to lower hostility and if the people around the room aren't laughing too, everyone gets tense--even when they are telling more jokes than ever online.

Johnson notes that, at the end of the gathering, when they turned off all the electronics, people returned to laughing together and the retreat was instantly more cohesive and collegial. He makes the point that the back channel was funnier, if measured in witticisms, than most gatherings but the room was happier when the back channel was turned off and the lol was actual, acoustical, socially shared, and bubbly with de-stressing oxytocins.

[Image courtesy of Flickr user TWM1340. For full documentation, please click on the image.]