Negative Emoticons

[bcholmes]

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.

Comments

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

In the sense that you don't pick up "stern" from text? I don't either, but I think the "being around since 1986" has had a lot to do with it. I wasn't involved with USENET back that far, but I was pretty active on FidoNet starting in about 1988. Back then, emoticons and other metalanguage were used very sparingly, and tended to get reserved for cases where there could be confusion over whether a statement could be considered serious or joking. People not so used to text communications, from long-standing tradition, seem to be those that pepper their prose with every emotional cue they can think of. Or perhaps the public has lost its sense humor or suffers from an irony deficiency.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

And we do know that you can't stand sarcasm.

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

Dude. Dude! DUDE!

Erm... Sorry...

BC, do you have the text of that somewhere? Non-verbal and metalinguistic communication is what I am planning on doing my grad work in, and amusingly enough, I have submitted a paper on the same, in which I had used smileys as one example.

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

I don't think I do. Sorry. I think, also, that it wasn't that great a report anyway.

[(Anonymous)]

Language is so limiting.......yet so pervasive, just ask Burroughs, he'll tell you it's a virus,
yet one in which we have no known antidote, nor do we necessarily want one!!!!!