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Happy Birthday, Smiley: Emoticon Turns 25 |
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Dr. Samuel Says -
Weirdness
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Monday, 08 October 2007 |
Fascinating article in this week's New York Times. It's about, essentially, how e-mail has become such a dominant communications vector that it is fundamentally changing the way we interact with one another. Check out the link for the full story, but here is the essential
message -- the "nut graph" as they say in the newspaper business:
 In contrast to a phone call or talking in person, e-mail can be
emotionally impoverished when it comes to nonverbal messages that add
nuance and valence to our words. The typed words are denuded of the
rich emotional context we convey in person or over the phone.
So true. How many times have you sent an e-mail that was intended to be
funny, but not received as such. Or sent a quick reply meant to be
efficient and neutral, but was interpreted as curt and impolite?
There's an entire field devoted to these phenomena as they occur on
the hard-science level of brain function: Social neuroscience is the study
of what happens in the brains of people as they interact.
Absent the usual face-to-face cues we use to process communications, or
even the subtler aural cues we get in a telephone conversation, e-mail
is a decidedly poor conveyor of emotional meaning. As Daniel Goleman
writes in the NYT piece, "…when we send e-mail, there's little to
nothing by way of emotional valence to pick up. E-mail lacks those
channels for the implicit meta-messages that, in a conversation,
provide its positive or negative spin." There's a larger conversation
here about blogs, social networking sites (FaceSpace, or whatever
they're called) and text in general -- whether digital or in print.
Interestingly, this week also marks the 25th anniversary of that
ubiquitous digital artifact known as the emoticon. According to this
report from Carnegie Mellon University, the emoticon — a.k.a. Smiley —
was born on Sept. 19, 1982, to proud papa Scott Fahlman, a research
professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon. It seems emoticons
were an early response to the problem of e-mail stoicism: The little
sideways smiley-face (or winking guy, or sad-guy, or what-have-you) was
a way to indicate -- "I'm joking," "I'm being sarcastic," "I'm
suicidal."
Very interesting, how our methods for talking to one another continue
to evolve. Human interaction marches on, and 1,000 new Communication
Studies Ph.D. dissertation proposals are born.
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