28 June 2007, ST
There was a time you were not deemed cool if you did not know your Smileys
By Tan Shzr Ee, culturevulture
SMILEYS are a dangerous thing.
I'm talking about those itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny things made up of colons, brackets and other punctuation marks, which are tagged to the ends of phrases when words alone can't do the trick.
Some examples: :) tells someone you're happy, ;) is for when you want to wink at someone, and :S tells them you're annoyed. There's also :*( for when you're crying.
Don't belittle them as throwaway add-ons to badly constructed sentences. Smileys are potent things, and more insidious than you might imagine. I've been a target of Smiley attacks myself, inasmuch as I have also abused them to my own selfish ends.
Smileys began innocuously enough.
On Sept 18, 1982, computer scientist Scott Fahlman at the Carnegie Mellon University in the United States proposed :-) as a 'joke-marker' for signalling different types of text-based communications in a world new to e-mail messages and the Internet. At the time, there were so many messages sent on two-dimensional, monochromatic computer script that the messages to be taken less seriously had to be marked out, with a cue to begin laughing.
Three taps on the keyboard and a twist of the neck towards the left, and voila! - a proto-emoticon. The Smiley was born.
Fahlman's stroke of genius was immediately adopted around the world, as high-speed communication processes like e-mail messages and Internet messaging delivered information instantaneously.
But they ultimately could not convey non-text cues such as body language, tone of voice, or the subtle emotional innuendoes of good old snail-mail letter-writing.
In the early days, Smileys filled the gaps in information transfer by oiling the machinery of cold hard facts traversing bytes of green words flickering on bottomless black screens. At an age when the virtual world was only understood by specialists, Smileys were a godsend. They were a social skill - or indeed, social grace.
But they evolved into a world of their own.
I myself was a late initiate to this world, having been brought up in a classical Singaporean education that prized writing essays in a copperplate longhand and punctuating sentences with proper full-stops.
I don't think I even learnt how to type on a keyboard until I was in secondary school. By the time the first Smileys had made themselves known to me, they were already the stuff of younger generations. They were ultimately inconsequential fripperies; they were a kind of pretty, linguistic 'sticker' - like dotting your i's with hearts or swishing an obscenely large loop around your y's.
Teenagers who wanted to act cute tacked Smileys onto the ends of sentences as some kind of socio-verbal tinsel.
Smileys heralded the degeneration of the English language and the stereotypification of emotions expressed verbally.
The bad news for me, however, was that Smileys had also attained poseur value. If you didn't know your Smileys, you were out of the 'in' crowd, as most certainly was I.
But no matter, I told myself. I would research the world of Smileys. I would learn to engage in its mix-and-match semiotics of iconographic communication.
I discovered that there were power Smileys, and there were Smileys you didn't have to crick your neck to one side in order to understand, such as these Japanese Smileys: (^_^) and (*o*).
In fact, a recent study revealed that the differences between Japanese and American Smileys showed up how emotions tended to be read in terms of variations in expressions and movements of a person's eye in Japanese communities, as opposed to differing shapes of the mouth in American communities.
The budding anthropologist in me was intrigued: The culturally contextualised Smileys had arrived.
And so they had, indeed - but also in other evil ways, which I am sure you must have experienced yourself some time or other.
I am referring to those dreary, saccharine e-mail messages from Cousin X, who is obviously having the worst honeymoon of her life but persists in pretending how wonderful the stainless-steel hotel taps and nosebleed theatre tickets are, with her endless profusion of =) and ;D in every sentence.
Then there are the distant friends of friends who come begging for inconvenient favours (like camping out in your bedroom for three weeks), prefacing their thick-skinnedness with a mischievous (but essentially devious) :-p.
Finally, there are also those evil, two-faced colleagues who stab you in your front by hurling a nasty insult in your face, getting away with it all by simply using :) as a 'humanising' suffix.
I know these things about Smileys. I might have used one trick or two myself ;-}.
So you see, Smileys aren't just Smileys. They have to be interpreted in layers of meanings - of outright impudence wearing the camouflage of clueless enthusiasm; of malicious intent tenderised by a wry, ironic virtual grin.
Smileys are dangerous things. :->
There was a time you were not deemed cool if you did not know your Smileys
By Tan Shzr Ee, culturevulture
SMILEYS are a dangerous thing.
I'm talking about those itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny things made up of colons, brackets and other punctuation marks, which are tagged to the ends of phrases when words alone can't do the trick.
Some examples: :) tells someone you're happy, ;) is for when you want to wink at someone, and :S tells them you're annoyed. There's also :*( for when you're crying.
Don't belittle them as throwaway add-ons to badly constructed sentences. Smileys are potent things, and more insidious than you might imagine. I've been a target of Smiley attacks myself, inasmuch as I have also abused them to my own selfish ends.
Smileys began innocuously enough.
On Sept 18, 1982, computer scientist Scott Fahlman at the Carnegie Mellon University in the United States proposed :-) as a 'joke-marker' for signalling different types of text-based communications in a world new to e-mail messages and the Internet. At the time, there were so many messages sent on two-dimensional, monochromatic computer script that the messages to be taken less seriously had to be marked out, with a cue to begin laughing.
Three taps on the keyboard and a twist of the neck towards the left, and voila! - a proto-emoticon. The Smiley was born.
Fahlman's stroke of genius was immediately adopted around the world, as high-speed communication processes like e-mail messages and Internet messaging delivered information instantaneously.
But they ultimately could not convey non-text cues such as body language, tone of voice, or the subtle emotional innuendoes of good old snail-mail letter-writing.
In the early days, Smileys filled the gaps in information transfer by oiling the machinery of cold hard facts traversing bytes of green words flickering on bottomless black screens. At an age when the virtual world was only understood by specialists, Smileys were a godsend. They were a social skill - or indeed, social grace.
But they evolved into a world of their own.
I myself was a late initiate to this world, having been brought up in a classical Singaporean education that prized writing essays in a copperplate longhand and punctuating sentences with proper full-stops.
I don't think I even learnt how to type on a keyboard until I was in secondary school. By the time the first Smileys had made themselves known to me, they were already the stuff of younger generations. They were ultimately inconsequential fripperies; they were a kind of pretty, linguistic 'sticker' - like dotting your i's with hearts or swishing an obscenely large loop around your y's.
Teenagers who wanted to act cute tacked Smileys onto the ends of sentences as some kind of socio-verbal tinsel.
Smileys heralded the degeneration of the English language and the stereotypification of emotions expressed verbally.
The bad news for me, however, was that Smileys had also attained poseur value. If you didn't know your Smileys, you were out of the 'in' crowd, as most certainly was I.
But no matter, I told myself. I would research the world of Smileys. I would learn to engage in its mix-and-match semiotics of iconographic communication.
I discovered that there were power Smileys, and there were Smileys you didn't have to crick your neck to one side in order to understand, such as these Japanese Smileys: (^_^) and (*o*).
In fact, a recent study revealed that the differences between Japanese and American Smileys showed up how emotions tended to be read in terms of variations in expressions and movements of a person's eye in Japanese communities, as opposed to differing shapes of the mouth in American communities.
The budding anthropologist in me was intrigued: The culturally contextualised Smileys had arrived.
And so they had, indeed - but also in other evil ways, which I am sure you must have experienced yourself some time or other.
I am referring to those dreary, saccharine e-mail messages from Cousin X, who is obviously having the worst honeymoon of her life but persists in pretending how wonderful the stainless-steel hotel taps and nosebleed theatre tickets are, with her endless profusion of =) and ;D in every sentence.
Then there are the distant friends of friends who come begging for inconvenient favours (like camping out in your bedroom for three weeks), prefacing their thick-skinnedness with a mischievous (but essentially devious) :-p.
Finally, there are also those evil, two-faced colleagues who stab you in your front by hurling a nasty insult in your face, getting away with it all by simply using :) as a 'humanising' suffix.
I know these things about Smileys. I might have used one trick or two myself ;-}.
So you see, Smileys aren't just Smileys. They have to be interpreted in layers of meanings - of outright impudence wearing the camouflage of clueless enthusiasm; of malicious intent tenderised by a wry, ironic virtual grin.
Smileys are dangerous things. :->
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