Negative Emoticons

Back when I was a co-op student, we had to write these really dumb work-term reports. One of the reports I wrote was about smileys and paralanguage indicators. This was, like, 1986 and I'd just discovered Usenet.

Anyway, the idea seemed sound: written words lack all those indicators that tell people how to interpret what you've written. The attitude seemed to be that most people read anger or sternness or some negative emotion in what they read and smileys help offset that.

If that's true, I think I read things a whole lot flatter than most people I know.