Francois Smit - Why we need smilies

Why we need smilies

Written by Debbie Smit

Sunday, 11 December 2005

When I was a horrid teenager ;-}, and electronic mail was just a twinkle in some nerd’s 8-) eye, my mother would write me beseeching letters that she would lovingly place on my pillow, hoping that her scribblings would cause some fundamental behavioural change in her errant daughter. I come from a long line of WASPs that finds vocalising feelings excruciating. So, rather than risk tears or screaming matches :-O that so often seethe under the surface in people like ourselves, we write. E-mail is a marvellous tool for communicating without really communicating. We’ve been reduced to writing lots of e-mails and SMS’s, often without giving them much thought, and usually lacking the care that my mother put into her writing. E-mail is possibly the most dangerous form of communication available to our modern world. It is so easy for meaning to be misconstrued with just a slip of the index finger and, unlike a telephone conversation, except if the call is recorded, your over-hasty key-tappings are forever burned into the memory of someone’s harddrive.
My mother, student and teacher of the niceties of the English language, wrote her letters to me on lined writing paper, folded neatly into a matching envelope.
E-mails, by comparison, are often haphazardly composed, and it is frighteningly easy to rattle off an emotional response to an e-mail – called ‘flaming’. If you really want to cause an eruption, write your e-mail entirely in uppercase – it has the effect of shouting into someone’s ear, however benign the content. It is bizarre that e-mails have such an alarming ability to evoke an emotional reponse in the reader.

This phenomenon places e-mail squarely in the arena of the spoken word rather than with written communication. Why is it that when reading an email, one somehow divines the expression on that person’s face, lending e-mail an immediacy similar to interactve conversation that it does not really deserve? One subconsciously gives a face to an e-mail even if you’ve never met the sender, almost as though you are having a telephone conversation with them. It is usually at this stage that things can go horribly wrong and your correspondence suddenly takes on mythical proportions.
There are a few simple rules to follow:
1. Don’t copy all the messages in your inbox to everyone in your address book – not a good way to win friends and influence people, although I did it once by mistake and people I hadn’t heard from in years phoned me up or sent me nice e-mails back!
2. Using the Bcc option when sending emails is very sneaky (use Bcc when you don’t want your Cc’s to know who you’ve really sent your message to).
3. Don’t compose novels via e-mail. Remember that e-mail is intended as a time- and labour-saving convenience.
4. Go easy on the punctuation. (FYI an exclamation mark is called a “bang” in computer-speak)
5. Don’t crash someone’s computer in your attempts to use fancy formatting in your mail.
6. Stick to well-known abbreviations like FYI and BTW. Steer clear of abbreviations like TNSTAAFL (there's no such thing as a free lunch)
7. In the absence of visual cues and vocal tone, some people add ‘smilies’ to their e-mails. Of course, embellishing your e-mails with lots of brackets, forward slashes, colons and percentage signs, may give the impression that you’re a notorious time-waster – and even these harmless dots and dashes can be misinterpreted. Smilies are fun though and can add a new dimension to your communication.;-)
etiquette on the net:
www.iwillfollow.com
www.emailreplies.com
www.dynamoo.com
www.webfoot.com