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The War on Emoticons
The International Herald Tribune had a great article yesterday about the insidious creep of emoticons into emails between "adults." It starts light:
There are many ways to console someone when a multimillion-dollar business deal falls through.... [Alexis Feldman] was working on a major deal when, "at the 23rd hour," she received "an e-mail from the broker saying: 'Sorry, my client is not interested in the space, too bad we couldn't make the big bucks' " And then there was a frown face emoticon.
Oddly enough, the article gets deadly serious:
Christopher Michel, the founder and chairman of Military.com, a military and veteran affairs Web site, said that usage of emoticons had grown "hyper-pervasive" in his communiqués even with admirals at the Pentagon, where they provide a certain cover for high-ranking leaders to comment on sensitive matters. "A wink says quite a lot," said Michel, a former lieutenant commander in the navy. "An admiral could say a wink means a thousand different things - but I know what it means. It's a kind of code."
How the hell did these little slugs, designed to clear up ambiguity and appropriate only for IM's between half-literate teenagers, morph into the military's solution to 'plausible deniabilty'?
I almost can't wait for Alberto Gonzales's next attempt to justify his lies about the domestic surveillance program. "The cameras weren't on me when I was answering your question, Senator, but as I'm sure you recall, I was sticking my tongue out of the left side of my mouth. I have asked the stenographer to add that to the record of my testimony."
Posted by Charles Star on 08/03/2007 | Permalink
Comments
There was also a similar (perhaps the same) story in the NY Times recently http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/fashion/29emoticon.html.
My favorite part:
“This is just my little gift to the world,” said Dr. Fahlman, now 59 and still doing computer-science research at Carnegie Mellon. “If there had been a way to charge a nickel each time, no one would have used it,” Dr. Fahlman explained. “It had to be free.”
Posted by: Steve Lambert | Aug 3, 2007 2:56:30 PM
Same story. IHT is part of the NYT company.
Posted by: Charles Star | Aug 3, 2007 3:02:22 PM
NYT is good and lucky.
Posted by: Thomas Pirovano | Aug 5, 2007 8:45:33 AM
Maybe I'm just getting older and I don't quite understand kids and adults these days who use these instead of actually writing out complete thoughts, or maybe we're all just getting dumber.
Posted by: d | Aug 9, 2007 5:51:31 PM
Very funny! :-)
Posted by: mnuez | Aug 12, 2007 1:09:11 PM
Personally, I'm on exactly the opposite side of this debate. I'm one of the many uber-geeks you comment on in the Linux article who has a lot of trouble figuring out what humans mean, when they are joking, etc, and I find emoticons *very* helpful and wish you wouldn't try and discourage people from using them. For that matter, I wish you wouldn't try and encourage people to think that there's some critical difference between teenagers and adults (and I've been both at this point) and that the adults should look down on the teenagers and/or think that their methods of communication are substandard. In fact, in general I'm going to give this post a ;-(.
S.
Posted by: Sheer | Aug 27, 2007 4:32:38 PM
p.s. thanks a lot for not warning me about posting my email address where web spiders can get at it. My inbox does not thank you for any additional spam that might arrive.
:-( :-(.
Posted by: Sheer | Aug 27, 2007 4:34:22 PM
