Lack of smilies, or: Overseriousity

L

Lazy Panda

Spaceman
Hi again community,

The thread name says it all. So, where comes that nobody uses smilies? Is the forum way too seriouss, or are you simply not paying attention in a quick reply.

:( Redemption for the smilies!
 
Malar smiles everyday. :)
Did I forget to mention that I was born with a smile?

Hahahahaha *cough* :) *eye-twitch*
The life is so funny.
 
We just all love pure ASCII, because if you misspell it right, you can get a lot of WC terms out of it, like...

C-I-SI (good one, surprised myself)
S-A-C-A (erm, almost. Don't count the I's)
ICIS (Hey, this actually worked..)

...well, and many more...
- that you can't do with smilies.

[CAUTION: I've watched my old Red vs Blue collection before answering to this post]
 
I like emoticons too :D. People communicate not only through words, but through emotions- and the computer can make it difficult to show that. This is noticable when you smile and someone tends to also smile. The opposite can be true too: someone smiles, but you're in a bad mood and it just ticks you off even more. Words influence emotions just as emotions can influence words (i.e. when you're happy you'll talk about something you like, when you're not, you're more inclined to complain.. although this thread is complaining that people should lighten up and smile more (insert confused emoticon here), not sure if this person was happy or grumpy ;). There's also logical reasons too: Sometimes you can't tell if someone's serious about something or if they're just joking- an emoticon can often make it clear. Sometimes this can save you from misunderstandings and even flame wars.
For instance: If I wanted to say sarcastically that the early 80's movie "The Last Starfighter" had great special effects, and I said:
"The Last Starfighter has the best special effects ever" You would think I thought that
vs.
"The Last Starfighter has the best special effects ever ;)" which lets you know I'm only kidding.

P.S. Of course Gandalf would win vs. Spock!! (but Spock would prob. insist that Gandalf was "highly illogical") Spock would also have a problem with what I wrote above, but I suspect Gandalf would agree :p
 
Fatcat said:
I make it a point never to use emoticons. They're stupid-looking and pointless.
Click to expand...
In normal face to face conversation you have all sorts of clues about the speaker's meaning beyond the words themselves. You have facial expression, body movement, tone of voice etc to let you know if he is joking/serious/sarcastic. Online, we are deprived of these cues, and emoticons are an attempt to simulate them.
 
While it might be true that emoticons may lead to clearer expression of subtext in ambiguous statements, I mostly see the tendency to oversimplify. You have dialogues in boards that go like that:

A: I absolutely adore :eek: Saffron Burrows
C: Wasnt she that real :cool: chick who had a nice :D but was :o all the time?
A: You guys just have no taste :mad:

Granted, it carries meaning, expression and subtext (and this board doesn't have enough smilies to really overdo it), but human beings have invented language to create a complex and rich communication method to express your personality - not just to make clear what you say.

So my private opinion is that smilies take away the opportunity to express yourself in words, and hide personality between little yellow masks.

[By the way: Why yellow, to begin with?]


[**Edit: I just found out that there is a maximum number of smilies that you can use per post (5?). Not very efficient for my example of smiley-overuse, but brilliant! Thanks, administrators!]
 
Mjr. Whoopass said:
"The Last Starfighter has the best special effects ever" You would think I thought that
vs.
"The Last Starfighter has the best special effects ever ;)" which lets you know I'm only kidding.
Click to expand...

Dude, I hate you.

No, really.
 
Oh, good that this has been restored; I was looking for it the other day..

Now I am in a caper: I like ASCII smileys (who remembers the profile ones?), but I despise the graphical (and even more the animated) variant.
I will soon reach a lower state of consciousness to find out the reason for this, and will return when I know more.

Meanwhile, there's a pretty exhaustive collection of ASCII emoticons here: http://www.astro.umd.edu/~marshall/smileys.html
 
I only use cold-war era ex-Soviet military emoticons.

I am happy. 0___0
I am sad. 0____0
Moldova is a former Soviet country between Romania and Ukraine. 0________0

Seriously, though, I've always found graphical emoticons really awkward -- you can't cut and paste them... and whenever I look back on anything I've logged involving emoticons, I always feel like an idiot for having used them.
 
Emoticons don't bother me as much as when people use things like "ur" instead of "your". Is typing the word out really going to take up that much more time?

I also don't like the word "methinks" which I've only seen online. I don't really know why, except that it makes me think of Jar Jar.
 
/Yeah, I prefer ASCII smilies... and sometimes the little pricks are useful to convey irony or a joke.
 
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