Many, many years ago, on one of the earliest ARPANET (the Internet's ancestor) mailing lists (probably HUMAN-NETS) I noted what was already becoming obvious -- that interaction restricted to text was likely to exacerbate many comments into misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and flame wars -- for the simple reason that all manner of human contexts -- speech emphasis, tone of voice, facial expressions, mannerisms, body language, and more, simply do not exist in a text-only universe. Sarcasm is almost impossible to express without labeling it explicitly, and using uppercase letters or bracketing asterisks for emphasis provide only the crudest of additional signals.
It is unfortunate that even after all these years, we find ourselves in pretty much exactly the same situation in email and social media, including, sadly, here on #Mastodon.
The more things change, the more they really do stay the same.
