Here’s my conundrum. I vividly – vividly – remember smilies becoming more popular and beginning to be used more commonly in email in Ireland. I remember thinking of people who used them as being incapable of mastering language well enough to convey an intended emotion without throwing in a selection of punctuation marks. I remember thinking of people that used them in work emails as unprofessional. Oh how I sneered at the : -) and the :*
Then along came emoticons. Even worse! Now the silly collection of punctuation marks was often replaced by a cutsey little picture of the emotion in question. People were writing things like “I’m happy ” because the word “happy” was just not enough to convey just how happy that happiness was.
Flash-forward to last week and an article by Alice Robb on the human reaction to emoticons caused me to reflect on how times (and my perception of the emoticon) have changed. Robb referenced a paper published in the Social Neuroscience journal by Churches, Nicholls, Thiessen, Kohler & Keage in which an interesting experiment was detailed. A group of participants was shown a series of images of faces (upright and inverted), emoticons and random characters. Only the emotion of happiness was tested, using smiling right-side-up and upside-down pictures, smilies, emoticons and symbols. They noticed that the human brain responds in the same way to a pictoral representation of a smile as it does to a picture of a smile on a human face. To a lesser degree, a smilie could elicit a similar response.
I found myself a little sad (i.e. ) to realise how much I have come to accept both the smilie and the emoticon into how I parse everyday language.
Now, those who know me might be surprised at my sadness. I make up words, nickname people and include the word “potato” in the unlikeliest of places. I also use emoticons and smilies – particularly on Twitter or IM, where I’m using less words and I use emoticons/smilies as a short-cut. I have come to use a very casual manner of writing on this here blog. But there is still a part of me that thinks that an incapacity to use words to convey emotion (or an incapacity to understand someone’s emotion through their words) displays a pretty meagre grasp of language.
I consciously don’t use emoticons when I email my mother. But here comes the bit: I do occasionally find myself wondering if she’ll get a joke or distinguish between a facetious comment and one meant in jest. What did we do years ago? Were we just more careful about how we put together a sentence? Were we just less prone to see an emotive comment in someone’s correspondence?
I have also taken to being highly insulted by the passive-aggressive smilie. This is when someone says something to you in an email that they probably wouldn’t have the cahones to say to your face, and then pop an emoticon or a smilie on the end of it. For example: “That press release last week went terribly wrong, didn’t it? I think if you had had an orangotan in a day-glow tutu dictate that to a drunken arachnid, it might have gone a little better... ”. AAAAAAGHGGGGGAGGAH – that makes me so insert-emoticon-for-angry-here!
We are a visual beast, and it is possibly no surprise that we have evolved this means of concatenating text and imagry, but I still feel a little like it’s cheating.
Resposted from http://www.emerkirrane.com/2014/02/24/if-i-dont-include-an-emoticon-will-you-still-believe-im-experiencing-an-emotion/