Emoticons: More on the orality of instand messaging

Happy : )

Wink wink ; )

Angry Eyes: >: (

Sad : ( Big Nose : > ) (I made it up. Yay!)

OMG!! : O

Silly : P

I don't know : $

For anyone unfamiliar with emoticons, what you have to do is tilt your head 90 degrees to the left and these seemingly random puntuations become little faces conveying simple emotions.

In a techno age rampant with text messages and Email a truly interesting phenomenon has occured. Instead of taking the time to eloquently convey the emothions behind the writing we hav reverted back to practices that are distinctly part of the oral culture: that of facial expresions. When we talk to eachother we convey more emotion through facial expressions and body language than we do through words... Not the case in writing and typography... untill NOW!

Now we end a sentance like "my dog died" which is a sad statement, but the emotion isn't necesarily conveyed acurately, so at the end we tak on a little sad face : ( or if we, fo whatever reason, are angry about the death of our dog we tak on angry eyes >: (

It's like Mr. Potato head on a keyboard, but what I'm getting at is that we are reverting back to the symbolice representation of emotions. We no longer say "Pizza makes me happy" we say "Pizza! : )"

I don't like it much either, but I think it's either because people are lazy (mostly true) or they are inherently tied to expressing their emotions through something other than words. It makes sense since we are the only animals that do convey meaning through words.... that is unless we train a monkey to use sign language...