Re: CHAT: Intonation surrogates in online text

Smileys infiltrated my writing via many many hours spent on live chat
(on the ISCA BBS, bbs.isca.uiowa.edu).  In animated, text-based chats,
I felt a real need to add little indicators of tone and mood, not to
prevent misunderstanding, but just as part of the expression.   When I
talk to people, sometimes I want to smile at people, not to prevent
their misunderstanding this or that, but just because I want to.  The
means was there and I used it.

The chance of my using smileys has since become directly proportional
to the "chattiness," informality, intimacy of the writing situation,
and I use them almost completely unconsciously -- they just get typed
automatically, the same way that the individual letters of words get
typed automatically without my thinking about them.

This particular missive feels formal to me, esp. since it's to a
general audience, so they don't come out.

But I have no problem with smileys.  They're just a slang, and a
useful one.

Ed Heil ------------------------------- edheil@postmark.net
"Facts are meaningless! You can use facts to prove anything
   that's even _remotely_ true!"           -- Homer Simpson

Raymond A. Brown wrote:

> At 2:21 pm +0200 7/7/99, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
> >> Date:         Tue, 6 Jul 1999 10:52:55 -0700
> >> From: Charles <catty@...>
> >
> >> Since Kibo hath given us smileys, which I despise, but what else
> >> is there? I think we should use them liberally. Yuck.
> >
> >If Kibo hath given thee smileys, it must be because he didn't want
> >them himself. But he is still giving us EXCESSIVE CAPITALIZATION and
> >lots of exclamation marks!!!! Let's take those instead, so Kibo can go
> >back to not using smileys.
>
> Ach - I'd rather have smileys   :)
>
> After not using the darn things, I've now taken to sprinkling the odd
> smiley or two around since I found that some remarks which I thought no one
> could possibly take as anything but a joke got taken seriously.  The
> smileys do help in this respect.  But I've discovered the 'winky smileys'
> can get quite the opposite reaction to what's intended - it does seem winks
> have more culture-specific meanings.
>
> Ray.
>
> ========================================
> A mind which thinks at its own expense
> will always interfere with language.
> [J.G.Hamann - 1760]
> ========================================
>