i don’t know what is more predictable: the findings of the scientific study on the psychological impact of emoticons, or that 20-something post-docs are using their time, brain and money to study the psychological impact of emoticons.

listen to that.  i am starting to sound like my father. but that makes sense.  these days, there are two camps and the mid-80s is the gap that divides.  either you are hip (you use emoticons), or you are old (you do not use emoticons).  you either multi-task while multi-tasking while planning to do something (emoticons), or you are a luddite and write long hand cursive spirally letters and employ words like “remember” (no emoticons).  either u c, or you see.  and i, you see, remember. ;)

back to the topic – the study found that the content of a message is strengthened by an emoticon and can “create ambiguity and express sarcasm online by varying the valence of the emoticon and the valence of the message. Overall, the authors conclude that to a large extent, emoticons serve the same functions as actual nonverbal behavior.”

so emoticons are like raising an eyebrow.  or furrowing your brow.  so, in place of personal interaction, fine.  but does this mean that is what SMS and email is – a replacement for personal interaction?  before the email why didn’t people have to use squiggly lines and dots with a ballpoint pen and binder paper when passing a message?

language was intended to be short and sweet for text message or email – and it is almost always flat.  unless you know someone well, it is often hard to ‘read’ meaning in these mediums, not only because there is no change in facial expression or penmanship, but becuase the medium is based on brevity and maintaining distance, there is no linguistic nuance.  just a hammer or no hammer.  just a happy or not happy.  just a joke or a not funny joke (usually a not funny joke).  and the emoticon gets us off the hook.  it injects emotion, albeit general and superficial, into an otherwise impersonal medium.  even though it in fact keeps things at a safe distance.  it is a “jk” when you are really not.  an emoticon says “i care, but not enough to take the time to explain that i do.”  it says we are familiar, but with maintained distance.

the emoticon dictionary maintained by netlingo defines something like 200 emoticons.  so instead of wasting time articulating what we mean in depth through actual words, we are developing a whole language of things that mean something shallow.  for example:

:-Z             “Angry Face”

:-{{           “Angry Very”

or,  the always useful

O-)             “Smiley After Smoking a Banana”

cut to the chase here.  this “new” media we are adopting as our language is changing not only the way we communicate, but what we communicate, and what we think.  this internet of ours is not narrow and deep, but very shallow and wide.  perhaps SMS is not the place for a sonnet, but if we consistently reduce our everyday language to LOL, XD, XD, XD, and winky-smiley faces with their tongues wagging out, we are shortsheeting our thoughts for good.

so, if you can’t tell, i fall into the non-emoticon camp, and am writing from that perspective.  and i am open to arguments, to complaints and any apostrophe eyebrow colon dash parenthesis you want to throw my way.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 4:49 pm and is filed under underground. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.