My daughter Hannah began to indulge in irony probably around the age of six or seven. Depending on the context, she could be quite frustrated or even fearful when she didn’t get it. When she finally would get it, it was often with great relief. Now, at the age of nine, she still sometimes asks, “you meant that ironically, didn’t you?” What’s so upsetting about it? Part of it is that, when she doesn’t get it, the world or I am being unpredictable to her. If she does get it, we’re in sync again. Being “in sync” doesn’t just mean that we share a harmonious mood; it means that we established a cooperative sign use. I produce the sign “I’m actually a famous rock star disguised as your father”; she interprets the sign. But if she doesn’t immediately get the non-literal sense in which the sign can be used, it can be confusing, at least for a moment. The example is hight-hearted, but I’m sure you can imagine grimmer versions that are disruptive to the point of triggering feelings of existential threat. – Now, did you notice how I just placed the (cognitive) responsibility on my daughter?

I said, “she didn’t get it”. Instead, I could have said, “I didn’t produce the right kind of sign.” But this move is so common that it’s hard to notice. We assume that “irony” and other figures of speech are well established conventions. Assuming that there are stable linguistic conventions and assuming that speakers and writers used them aptly, we tend to place the burden on the listener or reader, rarely on the producer. This is particularly obvious in online communication. Writing blog posts, for instance, I often wonder why people don’t read what I wrote but rather seem to single out a side issue and run with it. Of course, I’m joking now, readers of my blog are the most competent ones. But what’s going on here anyway?

The ableism involved in charges against (online) readers doesn’t help, but it’s not the issue I want to tackle now. Nor is the point to place the burden on the writer instead. The point is that linguistic conventions don’t just exist ready to use. When I say that someone “didn’t get it” or someone “didn’t express it clearly”, I’m supposing that it is a stable convention that I can hit or miss just like I can sing in or out of tune. But isn’t that the case? Well, it is and it isn’t. Linguistic conventions, I assume with a little help of Ruth Millikan, are stabilized for a reason. They serve certain purposes for the producers and the consumers of signs. (Consumers and producers should not be seen as humans or whole organisms but as cooperative systems, but that’s by the by now.) It’s the purpose or function that keeps the convention alive. If the proximate purpose of a remark is social alignment through irony, then it’s not enough for both parties to “hit” or “get” the convention of irony as such. Rather, the purposes of social alignment have to be connected to the use of irony for both parties, too. Why? Because the purpose of social alignment is what stabilises the convention. “Getting” the convention cannot be separated from participating in the function that that keeps the convention in existence. It’s not enough then to share knowledge of linguistic conventions; we (or our cognitive systems) have to participate in a certain set of common purposes. Such participation has to be established.

Why is that so difficult in online contexts? For Hannah and me, the purposes of social alignment can be established through various ways and sign uses. If one communicative attempt fails, there are thousands of other attempts that make up for it. Generally, in familiar local contexts, conventions are commonly established in relation to joint purposes that, in turn, will stabilize even most idiosyncratic conventions or codes. We form a community, both in the sense of linguistic conventions and the purposes that stabilize the conventions. Given then that we’d interpret and produce certain linguistic items in keeping with joint purposes, we might call this community an interpretive community. By contrast, in online contexts, we often have random or very reduced encounters. Here, it’s not a given whether we share in common purposes. While we might recognize familiar linguistic conventions, we cannot be sure that they are used in keeping with the same functions. Someone might write an ironic remark, but for the readers it hits on the irony might not be related to social alignment. In such situations, we’re at odds. But we’re at odds without noticing it, because what’s in front of us, the written ironic text, doesn’t reveal the mismatch of purposes. Neither the writers nor the readers are stupid. But they’re out of sync. They do not form an interpretive community.

In fact, online contexts are not only often populated by people out of sync. The playful recontextualization of conventions and memes lends itself not just to jokes and shitposting. It also undermines and destabilizes the cooperation required for forming interpretive communities. If the reassurance available to us in offline local contexts is entirely missing, we are often kept in limbo, yielding frustrated attempts of cooperation in sign use.