Ben Chun asked me an interesting question about graphical smilies last night and i thought that someone out there might know.
IM clients, freemail clients and BB software very commonly uses smilies. They turn textual smilies into absurd graphical ones, sometimes even animated ones. Yet, each client renders its own version of the smiley. Thus, even if you are using AIM, the type of smiley you will get will depend if you’re using the AIM client, iChat, Fire, etc. and whether or not you turned on conversion in the first place. How much do the differing renders affect how people read what is being said?
Of course, all i could do was ask more questions. He’s asking how the technical artifact affects the impression given. I’m curious how the way smilies are read differently because of cultural and individual context. For example, i was suprised to get an email from a woman i met in Mexico *filled* with smilies. They were jumping off the page. What communities use smilies regularly and why?
How much of the smiley representations are functionally textual and how much are they adornments, kinda like the tchotchkes that people add to their phones? Are they used to express emotion, to reframe the actual text?
We’re curious if there is any research on this (or if anyone has any insight).
I can only really speak from my own experience here, but I find that they tend to be used as conversational shorthand — just another tool in online chat to make up for the lack of inflection and body language, similar to the way people use “lol” and “hahaha”. To me, they give the impression of informality and even a juvenile flavor. They’re nontextual slang, if you will — “:(” instead of “sucks” or “dammit”, “:D” instead of “sweet!” or “hott!”.
I think that’s the key here: as slang, they serve a dual purpose of conveying some meaning and aligning someone with a particular subculture. For example, the types of smilies you use also affect how you’re perceived. I have some friends who frequently use anime-style smilies like “^_^”, which aligns them with that subculture just as surely as starting a conversation with “word” and ending it with “peace” would align someone with hip hop or club culture.
The graphical smiley interpretation complicates things a bit. You can only count on someone knowing what you mean if you either stick with the standard smileys (usually along the lines of “:)”, “:(“, “:P”, “;)”, and “:\”) or mix it up by using characters that the IM clients and bboards won’t interpret. For example, “>:(” has a very different appearance in iChat than it does in text form or pretty much any other IM client, and my friends who use iChat use it for humorous effect because of that. I used to resist graphical smileys as much as possible, but now I only turn off the most obnoxious implementations of them, like on the AIM client.
No research, but that’s my 15 minute theory on the subject.
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.
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.
FWIW, I use LiveJournal for my blogging, and I’ve started using the graphical smileys provided by the site in my blog entries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-/