Comments on: smiley aesthetics

By: Kirk

Kirk — Tue, 16 Mar 2004 10:35:16 +0000

I mean obviously, smilies are shorthand that try to convey emotional content, like spoken speech, preferably in formus (like IM) that are closer to casual talk.

I dislike graphical smilies of course, taking a clever little typographical joke and turning into a rebranded symbol of the 70s. Some people use more of the “weird” smilies (ones that you select from a menu, with no direct typographical equivalent) with more emotional nuance than I do.
Though I am fond of the ambivalence of :-/

By: ana

ana — Mon, 15 Mar 2004 19:46:23 +0000

Now, Danah’s post was interesting, but Patti’s response is downright fascinating. I certainly can’t speak for everyone, but I use smilies in exactly the opposite way she does, that is, to indicate that I’m NOT employing sarcasm or irony. Since body language or inflection are missing in textual conversations, I use them to indicate that I’m not being “snarky”; I’m really congratulating you, agreeing with your taste in music, supportive of that politician, and so on.

What’s really interesting is that I bet there’s about a decade or so between Patti’s use of the “original” smilies and my use of the graphical ones in AIM. Something worth looking at, maybe.

By: Patti Beadles

Patti Beadles — Mon, 15 Mar 2004 16:25:36 +0000

I still essentially use the three-character-ASCII smiley in its original context, that being to indicate sarcasm or irony.

Because I grew up with that tradition, it bugs me to no end to see constructs like, “Hello! ” My first instinct is to hunt for the irony in the statement, but then another part of my brain kicks in and points out that the author is speaking a different dialect than I am.

Graphical emoticons are evil.

By: Eugene Eric Kim

Eugene Eric Kim — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 10:53:25 +0000

There’s a new book out called, A Brief History of the Smile, written by Angus Trumble, who is a curator at Yale’s Center for British Arts. He talks about Internet smileys, but it doesn’t sound like he addresses the specific anthropological question you have. Nevertheless, could be interesting background reading. CNET published an interview today.

By: Eugene Eric Kim

Eugene Eric Kim — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 10:52:52 +0000

By: Jade

Jade — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 09:13:42 +0000

I can’t stand smilies. Some are ok, like the and ones, but only if people use small text so the smilies don’t look ugly. I’m only eleven [almost] but I’ve talked to many teens online or older friends in middle school and instead of a conversation it’s a smiley-a-thon which is annoying.

I use them from time to time but I find it annoying when friends put LINES of smilies in their messages. I find it so much easier to just say “I don’t feel happy today” then to insert hundreds of ugly smilies into a message, but that’s just me.

By: Ryan Shaw

Ryan Shaw — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 21:53:36 +0000

You ought to look into emoji, the iconic language used on Japanese cell phones. Emoji is shorthand for “emotional character.” I can attest that these are very widely used and loved in Japan. They have become a tool for lock-in because users get attached to particular companies’ icons and, since there is no standard, don’t want to switch because they will no longer be able to use those icons if they do. It also causes groups of friends to want to all buy the same type of phone so that they can use the same emoji with each other (if I send you email with emoji from a DoCoMo phone and you have an Au phone, you won’t see them). There are some gateways for doing emoji substitution between services, but I don’t see them becoming popular since people want particular icons that they like, not just any substitute will do. Of course teenage girls have already started creating their own personal emoji by drawing on paper, snapping a pic with their phone and emailing it.

By: Manish Jethani

Manish Jethani — Tue, 09 Mar 2004 10:45:31 +0000

FWIW, I use LiveJournal for my blogging, and I’ve started using the graphical smileys provided by the site in my blog entries.

By: Scott Moore

Scott Moore — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 17:55:13 +0000

Re: Research. Remember that for a long while the term for smileys was “emoticon” that might help in finding research. What little I have seen pretty much just documents the use of emoticons or emotes (when using a MOO, MUD and I guess some IRC supports emotes). Lynn Cherny wrote “Conversation and Community: Chat in a Virtual World” which covers linguistics in MOOs (particularly back channels and emotes, but not emoticons). I think you will find that some of the early use strictly replaced gestures and facial expressions lost in text communication. But that clearly changed especially as the use of instant messaging and chat spread.

I have had several defining moments in using emotes: While working in a entertainment-oriented avatar world, my volunteers were very informal. The world supported avatar gestures and reflected them in text (there were graphical emoticons that could be used in text). Since I was trying to be serious, I didn’t use emotes or emoticons. They all thought I was a huge jerk (and it blew up in my face late one night). After that I liberally used emoticons, but not always the built-in icons since that wasn’t the culture that had evolved. We used for grins, for evil grins. (BTW, someone put up a graphical view of those icons here: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Piemur/toolbar.htm )

The next defining moment was when I was in a MOO for the first time socially. I made a comment followed by a and a friend teased me privately about not using motes (Scott grins). I fired back that it was “my dialect”, which it was. I had picked up a regional way of speaking.

That’s how I tend to view it now, not just as slang, but as a dialect of a group of people.

By: paul

paul — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 15:32:38 +0000

have you seen smileys and the smiley dictionary?

as for aesthetics: i like iChat’s, dislike AIM’s and Adium’s, don’t mind Proteus’ or MSN’s.

At one point I turned off graphical smileys because the client i was using at the time (adium 1.6?) had really ugly ones.