Emoticons - the useful three little characters

In Anthony Funnell’s interview with Scott Fahlman, the inventor of the emoticons is surprised ‘how universal the emoticon's become’ and wonders how "these three little characters have survived" [referring to ;-)](Funnell 2007). More than 25 years ago, Professor Fahlman from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh made a suggestion to his colleagues that ‘a little sideways smiley face’ should be inserted at the end of a joke made online (Funnell 2007). As the internet developed to new places, email too arrived at those new places, followed by the emoticons and by 1990, emoticons ‘kind of burst into people's living rooms,’ said Fahlman (Funnell 2007). Falhman also said that he sees ‘an awful lot of mail with the original three characters and so people must find it useful’.

So what is emoticon? According to Kasper-Fuehrera & Ashkanasy (2001), the word ‘emoticon’ comes from the words ‘emotion’ and ‘icon’ and is the ‘illustrative of the innovative tricks that e-mail correspondents use to communicate’. Emoticons consist of typed symbols to signify emotions i.e. : -), being the ‘smiley’ (Kasper-Fuehrera & Ashkanasy 2001).

It's not that hard to decode what does this smiley mean. You don't need to tilt your head sideways! ;-p

Source: Brainsonfire 2007

As mentioned above, Falhman observed that many mails use that three little characters, therefore "people must find it useful" (Funnell 2007). However, the use of emoticon is often criticised. According to Pollach (n.d.), emoticons are not used for it would make reviews appear less professional. Besides that, Scheuermann & Taylor (1997) stated in their list of netiquettes (‘etiquette on computer networks’ and ‘conventions of politeness recognised on Usenet and in mailing lists’) that emoticons should be avoided:

Avoid smileys (or emoticons as they are sometimes called.

People don’t read with their heads sideways to the monitor. And anyway, they’re confusing. What does this mean? ~:-)- Curly headed guy with a cigarette in his mouth? I don’t know either.

I must differ with Scheuermann & Taylor. Why do we need to adhere to these rules? It isn’t like we will be penalised and be thrown to jail if we use emoticons! Yuasa, Saito & Mukawa (2006) said that emoticons play an important role to emphasise the conveyance of emotions in a sentence. One may wrongly misinterpret a message because emotions are hard to be conveyed when email is used as a medium of communication. This is because email is a form of computer-mediated communication (CMC) which ‘replaces face-to-face interaction’ that altered the ‘nature of communication’ (Huang, Yen & Zhang 2008). Therefore, the use of emoticons should be encouraged. Not only emoticons are fun to use, it enriches information, subsequently improving communication effectiveness, resulting in users can ‘convey more in less time’ (Huang, Yen & Zhang 2008). 

So what if a document does not look professional with it? Trends are ever-changing. Instead of stubbornly refusing to follow it, people should accept and keep up with it. Eventually, what was regarded ‘unprofessional’ will be accepted soon if it is widely used. 

What say you? Do leave a comment below or drop a message in the chat box at the sidebar! ;-)

References

Funnell, A 2007, 'Emoticons and email ettiquette', The Media Report, ABC Radio National, viewed 14 June 2010, <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2007/2064342.htm>.

Huang, AH, Yen, DC & Zhang, X 2008, 'Exploring the potential effects of emoticons', Information & Management, vol. 45, pp. 455-473. 

Kasper-Fuehrera, EC & Ashkanasy, NM 2001, 'Communicating trustworthiness and building trust in interorganizational virtual organizations', Journal of Management, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 235-254. 

Pollach, I n.d., "Trust me, I'm an expert": The transmission of social cues in consumer interactions on the WWW, viewed 16 June 2010, <http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/ci/cyber%20hub/cybercultures/c3/pollach%20paper.pdf>.

Scheuerman, L & Taylor, G 1997, 'Netiquettes', Internet Research: Electronic Networking Applications and Policy, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 269–273.

Yuasa, M, Saito, K & Mukawa, N 2006, Emoticons Convey Emotions without Cognition of Faces: An fMRI Study, viewed 15 June 2010, <http://delivery.acm.org.ezlibproxy.unisa.edu.au/10.1145/1130000/1125737/p1565-yuasa.pdf?key1=1125737&key2=9144866721&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=91921916&CFTOKEN=57562771>.