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.