What is online miscommunication?

Online miscommunication is a concept in personal epistemology: Online messages strip context that face-to-face communication provides automatically.

Example: You post a sarcastic joke in a group chat with close friends who share your sense of humor. Someone screenshots it and shares it on a public forum. Without the shared history, the trust, the tone of voice, or the wink — the joke reads as a sincere and offensive statement. The words are identical. The context is gone. The meaning inverts.

This concept is part of Phase 9 (Context Sensitivity) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for context sensitivity.