The Theory Schmucks

From a 1982 Arpanet post made just after the invention of the internet emoticon:

Because you can’t see the person who is sending you electronic mail you are sometimes uncertain whether they are serious or joking. Recently, Scott Fahlman at CMU devised a scheme for annotating one’s messages to overcome this problem. If you turn your head sideways to look at the three characters :-) they look sort of like a smiling face. Thus, if someone sends you a message that says “Have you stopped beating your wife?:-)” you know they are joking. If they say “I need to talk to you :-(“, be prepared for trouble.

I’m going to break a personal rule and give you just one link to chew on this post: the recovered 1982 Carnegie-Melon University chat thread in which emoticons were invented. There was a reason the text smiley was invented, and it wasn’t because some twelve-year-old couldn’t figure out a better way to express himself. It was created because a pHD-holding researcher at Carnegie-Melon realized that text without bracketing has an incredibly hard time communicating emotion, even between friends and colleagues.

Okay, I lied: I’m going to throw another link at you. Check out what Wikipedia has to say about Albert Mehrabian’s rule, which in a nutshell states that, in face-to-face communication, 93% of what we’re communicating about our feelings, beliefs and convictions happens outside of the words we’re saying. Specifically: 55% of our attitude — Mehrabian’s word for all those feelings, beliefs and everything– is communicated through body language, 38% through tone of voice, and only 7% through words themselves.

Let me re-emphasize something: Mehrabian did his study on face-to-face communication, not voice or text communication. Obviously, 100% of your attitude is communicated through words if you’re texting without emoticons or bracketed phrasing (like: *laughs*). Moreover, I can’t find any studies that talk about how much attitude is lost transitioning the same conversation from face-to-face to voice-only or text.

That said, 93% of our primary mode of communication is still non-textual. Do you think we somehow fill in the difference ourselves when we communicate without body-language or voice-tone? Of course we do. We adapt by paying more attention to word choice and punctuation. We italicize, and boldface, and underline, and throw in ellipses and hyphens and everything else we can think of. We do all those things to simulate tone of voice. And when simulated voice isn’t enough, we turn to simulated body language.

That’s where emoticons come in. Yes, they’re artificial. Yes, it’s easier to type a smile you aren’t feeling than to actually smile one. And yes, it’s still another good step towards simulating face-to-face conversation, because it further humanizes text.

Put another way: there are 53 million AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) users in the world today. They use AIM because they want to communicate — that is: connect — with somebody else, over a distance, without body or voice. Anything that allows them to better connect with the human being on the other end is a blessing, and thinking of emoticons as childish or simplistic ignores the genuine understanding they can lend to online communication.