{"id":176574,"date":"2009-04-01T14:26:01","date_gmt":"2009-04-01T21:26:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/doycetesterman.com\/?p=1141"},"modified":"2009-04-01T14:26:01","modified_gmt":"2009-04-01T21:26:01","slug":"the-death-of-the-emoticon-235","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/2009\/04\/the-death-of-the-emoticon-235\/","title":{"rendered":"The death of the Emoticon"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"2206_mourning_over_dead_friend1\"<\/a>A few weeks ago, I noticed an interesting comment from someone I follow on YouTube, which went something like this.<\/p>\n

\n

“This is really great news, which I feel calls for a pretty major deviation from my normal internet posting rules. I know you guys hate them, and you know that I hate them, but just this once, in honor of the occasion, I’m going to type a smiley. :-D”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the replies to the original poster, I saw a number of people surprised (or mock surprised) at the inclusion of the smiley, and it got me thinking about emoticons<\/a> in general; has there actually been a drop off in their use?<\/p>\n

After almost a week of paying desultory attention to<\/span> painstaking research on the subject, I’ve decided the answer is a qualified yes. Yes, within the group of people whose electronic communication I regularly read, there has been a marked drop off in the use of emotion-indicating text markers. They aren’t completely gone, but there are definitely fewer showing up than there used to be.<\/p>\n

Any thoughts on why that might be?<\/p>\n

My personal theory is that emoticons emerged (re-emerged, actually, since they were in use in other non-electronic eras) when communication over the (nascent) internet was starting it’s first major uptick, and more and more people were trying to make use of the written word, sans<\/em> any other medium, to make a point or (harder still) have a conversation and\/or debate. The reason given at the time was that communication solely via text was ripe for miscommunication – that text robbed the speaker of tone and inflection critical to conveying the nuances of an ironic or satirical statement. In short, they were saying they needed a smiley face so that people knew they were joking. (Conversely, readers said they needed the smiley to identify such things.)<\/p>\n

Are people less sarcastic\/ironic\/satirical today? Seems unlikely. Sure, most of us use a smiley here and there, but – at least for me – it’s often to take the sting out of a particular harsh statement; less “this is a joke” than “remember we’re all friends here.” My opinion is that we (the global internet-using culture) have so immersed ourselves in text-based communication since those early digital days that we’ve collectively relearned how to clearly communicate nuance in the medium, as well as how to detect<\/em> it.<\/p>\n

We’ve become better readers. And writers.<\/p>\n

Now if we could just get people to stop typing “LOL” as though it’s an actual word.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago, I noticed an interesting comment from someone I follow on YouTube, which went something like this. \u201cThis is really great news, which I feel calls for a pretty major deviation from my normal internet posting rules. I know you guys hate them, and you know that I hate them, but just \u2026 <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The death of the Emoticon”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-176574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links-resources"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176574\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}