It’s hard for me to say exactly what I dislike about smilies. My best approximation is that I try to parse text as if it were speech, mentally inserting things like tone and facial expression where appropriate. Smilies don’t parse as speech, and I’m already mentally inserting the elements of tone that they’re supposed to stand in for.
The way it affects me is rather like a person ending a sentence with
“Fweeeee!”
And when I ask “Why did you make that sound?” they say
“So you can tell I’m enthusiastic!”
If I had been taught to read in a context where smilies were effectively punctuation marks used to denote tone, I might not feel any differently about them than, say, exclamation marks. But I wasn’t, and as is I can’t help thinking of them as unnecessary and annoying additions to a text that should be expressive enough on its own, the way I can’t help thinking of wordless emotive noises tacked on the ends of sentences as extraneous and annoying.
That makes a lot of sense. Smileys aren’t very natural for text within paragraphs because paragraphs can convey tone as a whole entity. But for those of us who learned to type in chat/IM environments, smileys make a huge difference because you don’t have a whole entity to reference in that situation. A conversation is a stream of statements, so if someone says “you stupid jerk!” in IM, you’re expected to reply—but in a conversation it would be clear that they really mean “you stupid jerk! =P” through tone and facial expression. So that’s how people naturally become smiley-dependent.
It’s hard for me to say exactly what I dislike about smilies. My best approximation is that I try to parse text as if it were speech, mentally inserting things like tone and facial expression where appropriate. Smilies don’t parse as speech, and I’m already mentally inserting the elements of tone that they’re supposed to stand in for.
The way it affects me is rather like a person ending a sentence with
“Fweeeee!”
And when I ask “Why did you make that sound?” they say
“So you can tell I’m enthusiastic!”
If I had been taught to read in a context where smilies were effectively punctuation marks used to denote tone, I might not feel any differently about them than, say, exclamation marks. But I wasn’t, and as is I can’t help thinking of them as unnecessary and annoying additions to a text that should be expressive enough on its own, the way I can’t help thinking of wordless emotive noises tacked on the ends of sentences as extraneous and annoying.
That makes a lot of sense. Smileys aren’t very natural for text within paragraphs because paragraphs can convey tone as a whole entity. But for those of us who learned to type in chat/IM environments, smileys make a huge difference because you don’t have a whole entity to reference in that situation. A conversation is a stream of statements, so if someone says “you stupid jerk!” in IM, you’re expected to reply—but in a conversation it would be clear that they really mean “you stupid jerk! =P” through tone and facial expression. So that’s how people naturally become smiley-dependent.