I am quite puzzled as to why most people insist on using either a smiley or an emoticon as a regular part of their emails (and IM). The theory is that emoticons are supposed to be a replacement for facial expression lacking in text only communciation. But I have discovered that the 🙂 can express three different emotions – happiness, sarcasm or a joke. That defeats the purpose in my view.
If you write the way you talk surely you would not need to use an emoticon as confirmation of how you are feeling. Written communication IS different from oral communication, but writing often helps the thinking and makes things clearer. So the fact that something is written is no excuse for not being able to express emotion. If you write the way you think and talk there’s no need for emoticons.
Emoticons also seem to be a generational quirk. It’s ‘cool’ to use emoticons. If your friends use emoticons, you have to use them too. In my opinion this is internet peer pressure.
How did we get on in the days before email when we wrote letters to people? Did we sprinkle emoticons throughout our writing to show people how we were feeling? No, we wrote as if we were actually talking to them. There were no mixed messages to my knowledge.
Emoticons, in my opinion, make email writers lazy. They think if they end their sentences with an emoticon they dont have to worry too much about how they have written an email. Perhaps the email smiley face has done more to degrade our wirtten communication than to improve it. We dont need to be told that a jokes a joke with a smiley emoticon. It spoils the joke. If you are writing happy words we know you are happy.
So, out with the smiley and emoticon and in with more emotion in the words we use when writing emails or using IM.
A very interesting topic and a very interesting take.
Personally i use emoticon’s a lot :-), when i am talking to someone i tend to smile at them throughout the conversation, sometimes if someone says something to me i just want to grin at them, so thats what i do, i grin at them virtually through an emoticon.
When i write letters, i have always drawn pictures of smiley faces, covered the letters in stickers of smiley faces, hearts, and other things. I like to represent things quite visually as well as verbally, or via text.
For me then, using electronic emoticons has been an extension of what i have always done in my hand written communications.
This is only for social interactions i might add, one wouldn’t tend to be so casual in formal communication, work related communication, e.t.c.
(though who knows, perhaps putting a big smiley face on your tax form isn’t a bad idea.)
I think the way emoticons are used is different depending on who they are used by. If you talk to someone alot who uses emoticons you get to know their style, and can tell what they mean when they use a certain emoticon.
In terms of spoiling any jokes by using smiley faces, perhaps that may be the case, yet at the same time perhaps it helps to ensure there is no confusion and that people realise that its a joke, where it could possibly be other than a joke.
So i’d have to say i disagree with your overall statement, I certainly won’t stop using emoticon’s because i find them an extra tool which helps expression when talking on the web. 😀
I tend to only use the smiley only for expressing happiness and use the winking smiley 😉 for a joke (including a reaction to someone else’s joke). A lot of the time things you write can be interpreted badly, and it helps to soften it with a wink if it’s a joke. You can definitely put a lot more emotion into your speaking voice than you can in writing. A lot of time people can take you a lot more seriously than you intend when it’s written. In fact even when you speak you can be misinterpreted – I’d quite like it if I could put a winking smiley into my speech too 😉
In a way I suppose it’s kind of peer pressure – in the sense that there’s a shared understanding of what these symbols mean between the people you often communicate with on the internet. It’s almost like a type of shorthand.
The comparison of letter writing styles before the widespread use of computers, with the style that has evolved with the advent of emailing and Instant Messaging is interesting. It seems to me that in the old days (ie before 1970) letter writing (apart from business correspondence) was primarily to relations and friends. In order to convey ideas and thoughts involving feelings, emotions and affections the authors had to write quite descriptive and detailed language. The accurate portrayal of these emotional passages was enhanced by the readers having first hand knowledge of the personality of the writers. So when the writer wrote ironic passages or embarked on a sad description or a joyful experience, it was extremly unlikely that the passages would be misinterpreted.
The computer age spawned the internet’s rapid growth and in turn gave rise to the ability of people to reach a huge audience to talk about subjects of mutual interest. Internet news groups became a vast forum where the audience was virtually unknown to the writers. This episode in the history of human communications seems unique in that for the first time a vast number of people were writing to others and they did not have first hand knowledge of the culture and background of their audience. They would have been ignorant of how irony or sarcasm or joy or sorrow may have been interpreted by their unseen audience. Indeed different members of their audience, depending on their background and culture, may have laughed at the same statement that another person may have taken offence at. Lacking the visual cues of facial expression and body language which is present when talking to strangers, it is little wonder that a sub culture of written clues evolved to try and avoid misunderstanding and to direct the reader in the direction the author indended.
It seems clear to me that in this explosion of global communication there arose this need to convey emotional clues when writing to strangers.
However in my view there was another compelling reason which contributed to the developing emoticon culture. The computer age is characterised by an almost obsessive desire to do things more and more quickly. This desire for speed also manifested itself by authors of news group postings, email, instant messaging etc wanting to speed their writing by taking on board abbreviated characters that were able to say “I am smiling when I say this so dont take it the wrong way”. So using emoticons served two valuable purposes and they started to be used by authors even when writing to people well known to them.
Gradually it became the cool thing to do. It was new and innovative and served a purpose. When tiny graphics were able to be substituted for the character groups, then the culture was here to stay.
But people do not have to use emoticons. There is no room in good writing for emoticons where emotions and feeling and thoughts need to be described using good and descriptive language. But that type of writing is not appropriate for instant messaging, but may well be appropriate in emails to family and friends where the emails composition can be done at leisure.
On the internet there are forums to suit everybody’s different writing styles, but people should not feel constrained to adhere to any particular style.
I must admit that I do like the yellow colourful smiley. They are very cute. In fact I used my first one in an IM conversation with Novey. It looked kind of ‘neat’ sitting there all by itself. I could’ve given it a big cuddle it looked so cute. The yellow 🙂 in both of the comments submissions above do add some colour and decoration. I could even smile at them. But the colon, dash, bracket does nothing for me. I certainly don’t smile when I see that one. Having been a typist for 50 years and constantly using those symbols in punctuation, it’s just so boring seeing them representing happy feelings or joking. Is there no way of using those nice decorative ones in email? How much fun I would have if I could use those ones.
I also draw 🙂 faces. I draw them on children’s work at school to show them I’m happy with them and their work. I also give them 🙂 stickers. Nic, I bet when you are doodling you draw lovely round 🙂 faces, not colons, dashes and brackets.
Did you know that in 1963 the 🙂 was used for the first time by an Insurance Company to bolster employee morale? That’s 46 years of smileys by my calculation. But I’m talking about the cute round yellow face, not the boring colon, dash, bracket.
I doubt whether people would use any sort of emoticon when applying for a job or even when emailing fellow employees in a formal manner. I would use 🙁 for my tax return (especially this year’s one).
I would never joke with people who didn’t know my sense of humour via email so the : – ) would not be part of my armoury. I would, however, use 🙂 if I could.
Without wanting to repeat myself, you do have time to formulate an email and time to choose your words carefully so misunderstandings shouldn’t occur. I think there is more of a problem when you are using oral communication. You have no time to consider the words you are using and your comments can upset people. How many times have you heard “I’ve just had an argument with …….I’ll just write to them and apologise”. I rest my case. Writing can be very powerful.
Vern, you say that before email, authors wrote in a descriptive and detailed way because they knew the people they were writing to, so sadness and joy could not be misinterpreted. What’s so different now? Aren’t we writing to these same people? We still have first hand knowledge of their personalities. You said that in those days writing would not be misinterpreted. Can you tell me why it can be misinterpreted in an email now?
I’m not including instant messenging as a criticism of using emoticons in this posting because as I have discovered you have to type extremely fast and think very fast as well so using the smiley is absolutely appropriate. And they are the cute smiley ones.
I’m quite sure my posting wont constrain anyone from using a particular style on the internet. Nic and Raewyn will still use those boring : – ) emoticons. I will wait for those cute, cuddly, lovable, decorative 🙂 ones when they are able to be used on emails as quickly as on Skype or Windows Messenger.
Congratulations Vern, not one emoticon in your comments submission.
You should use my email software (thunderbird) – it puts in the little pictures for emoticons. I find that I don’t see a colon dash and bracket any more though, they have become a true representation of a smiley face to me – more than the sum of their parts.