Emoticons :-)

Do you use this :-) regularly? Are they an important part in your emails and whenever you chat online? Do you know who created it, dear readers?

Well read on.

A survey done by the UCLA Center for Communication Policy in the year 2001 states that eighty eight per cent of all Internet users use their email. However, not all of these users know how to use or write an email correctly. A lot of users, according to Greenstone (n,d), simply do not know how to add in emoticons which somehow adversely lead to confusion or causing the receiver to misinterpret a message and therefore gets his or her feelings hurt.

According to the transcript in The Media Report, Funnell (2007) states that many people do not have a clue as to how to interpret what they receive. Someone could take a completely innocent and well-meaning email and instantly misinterpret it as sarcasm. For example, when the email really meant,

"I really had a nice time today,"

a person could also interpret it as sarcasm and anger.

According to Scott Fahlman, a professor who is based at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, the basic smiley face could be typed out by simply typing a colon (:), a hyphen (-) and then a parenthesis.

Two and a half decades later, even though the :-) smiley still remains, there is now a whole new generation of emoticons, graphical emoticons with animation, but Falhman still uses the emoticons he created- the smiley face and the frowny face.

:-)

the old smiley

the new smiley

(image source: http://ifieverfeelbetter.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/smiley.jpg)

In my opinion, emoticons play a very important part in showing how a person is feeling, especially on hand written items like email, chats and through sms to actually convey what you want the other person to reocgnize how you feel phsyically instead of having the other person misinterpret what you actually feel. I'm an avid user of the emoticon, and I don't intend to stop anytime soon! :-)


References:

Funnell, A 2008, ‘Emoticons and email ettiquette’, The Media Report, viewed 8 November 2008, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2007/2064342.htm

Greenstone, B n.d., ‘E-Mail Etiquette’, mainelearns.org , viewed 8 November 2008, http://www.mainelearns.org/ovc/story_files/email_etiquette.pdf