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UK: Pissed = Drunk. Which could do with having it's own emoticon - certainly around here. |
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//You don't actually have to dig up emoticons. It turns out people can communicate just fine without them// That is an interesting, debatable point - many, if not most, people who email or message are not professional communicators, and subtleties of language may evade them or their readers. Emoticons can be a useful prop. |
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[jutta] I work quite a lot with people staffing call and live help centers. This kind of stuff is pretty important to them (for their internal conversations, of course) |
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There's no doubt that communication over email and other text based systems is a very different beast to phone or real-life. Face to face you get a huge array of information coming in: body language, tone of voice, eye movement and blink rate, much more than we realise. It has been estimated that 60% of face to face communication is non verbal (though I don't know how on earth you'd start measuring that sort of thing). Email has been a huge success in business, partly because you have much tighter control over the information you give out than you do on the phone or face to face, but for this reason it is nice to be able to put that additional non-verbal communication back when using email for social contact. It means that we can get some way towards using the keyboard to speak, reinforcing what we say with nonverbal cues. That is a very different thing to writing. [+] |
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[wagster] leans back to release the tension in his neck from typing and glances sideways in a guilty manner to see if anyone is getting concerned at his use of a work computer. |
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[jutta] I'm with [wagster]. Sorry, but language (my main experience is of the common one that divides myself and my American colleagues) and different life experiences means that emoticons are essential to many of my communications. |
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Essential? Give one example. |
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(though I should point out that we're wandering off topic) |
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it depends how well you know the person. emoticons are useful with strangers - I imagine that is how smiles and grins evolved anyway but when conversing with someone I know very well, they are not necessary at all. |
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//I imagine that is how smiles and grins evolved // (wandering further off topic)
There was this great public television show called Connections with James Burke (also had a page in each Scientific American with the same title). In one episode he explored a theory on where the smile came from - it's very close to a look of fear, and may have originated as a show of respect. |
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<picks little insects out of world's hair> |
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(UK version)(Limited editon, 12 inch coloured vinyl) |
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Should be a melody hit label. |
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I would really appreciate to the point commentary. Comments on the value of IM or emoticons in general miss the point of the post. |
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We can discuss value of IMs, blogs, emails, cellphones, and other late technologies elsewhere. |
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Since most IM implementations already use iconic representation of users, and some allow customized icons (like, for instance, the Yahoo game system), it seems useful to allow dynamic setting of those icons based on a variety of parameters, including mood. |
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This idea simply proposes a mechanism to achieve that. Perhaps I should have simply used the word "icon" rather than emoticon. |
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I think the term you're after is 'avatar.' |
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Or "user icon," or "picon." |
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I certainly understand why you want pictures to convey your meaning. |
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