Social Experiment Project Report
Concept: To determine Precision and Vagueness and the clarity of ideas.
Question: How does the vagueness of a simple open ended statement posted on Facebook impact communication and the clarity of what is being communicated?
Exploration: To explore this concept and to answer my question, I posted a vague sentence on Facebook for 20 minutes to see what my responses would be and how many different interpretations would be done. I wanted to see how the statement would be understood because it was so vague and there was no clarity within the post. The post said, “I said yes…” The message is based on the assumption of the goal of language without making it completely clear. What I actually said yes to was pancakes for breakfast, but did not clarify what exactly I said yes too.
Results: For the 20 minutes I left the post up, I had one person text me within one minute asking if my boyfriend had proposed. Three others asked the question of engagement. Three people asked the question “to what?”. One person asked if I said yes to living in Arizona, since I was on vacation there. One person asked if I said yes to green beer in the spirit of the Irish, and the final person just posted three question marks. Because of the vague communication of my post to Facebook it was unclear to my friends what message I was trying to relay and not understood as a result.
Answer: Because none of the recipients of the post understood what I said yes too and many responded with guesses that were incorrect, it is understood and has been determined that language can shape the way a message is perceived and understood. The sender of the message needed to clarify what was being said and the listener would have been clear on what the message was that was being sent. Many misunderstandings arise from incorrect meanings or misinterpretation of what was being said.
