How I communicate

Personally, I communicate in a wide variety of ways. The primary way, as I expect is for most people, is face to face talking. We have evolved emotive faces and mastered speaking, so for conveying meaning it is by far the best, and much has been made of the power of speech. However, these days developments such as the internet have vastly changed communication.

As one of the internet generation, I do not utilise normal mail or telephones as better methods exist and I am capable of using them.

For professional business I use an e-mail account. The benefit of this is I can send and receive information at a time that is convenient for me. The lack of personal information there means I do not worry about third parties seeing it.

To talk to friends I use facebook. Facebook is great at collating social information and handing it back to me in a much more digestible way. I learn about events like parties or birthdays at an appropriate time, I can gauge the general mood of people and learn stuff about them from their status' and I can then enter discussions with them. I also upload status' myself though I try to make these either generally amusing anecdotes or sharing stuff I like with friends. I occasionally use the chat feature, but typically to ask specific questions or discuss something, rarely just for chat.

Because I tend to have particular and obscure tastes I use forums to talk about art that interests me, like music, films and vidyagames. YouTube comments are my primary place to talk about stuff because the site doubles up as a video-hosting site and I can find exactly similar people depending on the video (Nine Inch Nails fans on a Nine Inch Nails video). I would also say I belong to a handful of online communities, like trueachievements.org, because collecting Xbox achievements is a hobby of mine and also I will need help for many, so I meet up with other people their and meet up later on the Xbox.

Finally I make a lot of use of my Xbox's party system, which allows up to 10 people to enter a simultanous discussion using headphones. As I spend a lot of time on my Xbox and all my good friends do too this fits in nicely with our schedules. If I am playing a game that doesn't have a narrative or require emotional input from me, such as abstract games or online play, typically I am in a party talking because it is fun.