Thursday, July 7, 2011

Emoticons: They Don’t Accomplish What You Think They Do

I remember the first time I ever saw an emoticon.  It was back in the late ‘90s and using my Compuserve email account (yep you heard right: Compuserve.  Just saying it brings me flashes of the song Mmmbop and checking email in between chapters of whatever Judy Bloom book I was reading)  I was exchanging emails with a classmate.  Even though we were in all of the same classes, had a note notebook (one notebook containing all our notes to each other that we’d pass back and forth in the hall between classes), and ate lunch together, at night we tried out this new thing called email and kept up our 24/7 communication (pre-cell phones and text messages).  I remember in one of her emails I saw a bunch of equal signs followed by an end parenthesis.  I was so confused.  Were these math equations?  Then I realized that “=)” was a smiley face.  
From there advances in social media progressed.  Next there was the AOL IM account, my own Yahoo! email account, text messages, work, Gmail, Gchat and so on.  A lot of my friendships are conducted primarily through these forums (phone calls are for losers!).  The problem of course with communicating like this is that tone doesn’t translate.  You can read an email or an IM and perceive it as being incredibly bitchy when it was not meant that way, or you can lose some of the emphasis you want to have in a “go fuck yourself email.”   This is where emoticon use (and abuse I will argue) come into play.
The purpose of emoticons are of course to show emotion.  To me, they make most sense where they’re used in lieu of words.  Maybe to compliment something you’ve said.  I use them and I'm not saying they should be ditched entirely.  But there are a few ways that emoticons get used that drives me up the wall. 
The first is the overuse of the emoticon.  In the office, please do not send me an email asking me to do something work related and followed by a smiley face.  It looks like the work product of a 13 year old girl.  Seriously.  In the work place, be professional.  This isn’t elementary school; we don’t gold stars on our work product, I don’t need a smiley face either.  Say what you mean, mean what you say and you won’t need the emoticon.  Plus in my line of work, those documents could end up being produced in a public forum and I don’t want to look like an unprofessional intern and neither do you, late 40s boss.
The second is the use of an emoticon to cover-up a bitchy statement.  Recently an email came to us in the office reminding us to complete our billing by the end of the month.  It ended with “I will be giving up names for the late birds so please get your time in on time! :-)”  You JUST said that you’re going to turn us in for discipline if we didn’t have something done by 4pm on a certain day.  That’s not a happy statement!  That’s a bitchy statement and the emoticon doesn’t make you look like less of a bitch.  It just doesn’t!  Once I had a text message exchange where it was clear I had annoyed the other person as evidenced by a very curt reply.  In my head I thought, “Sheesh calm down dude.”  But I’m a big girl and don’t take things like that personally.  I sent a reply like “Understood” or something and I got back, “THANK YOU!!! :-D.”  Listen sugar, the “extra happy face” does not make up for being a dick!  Just go with it, or say something along the lines of “I’m sorry for that last message.  That was short of me.”  Emoticon doesn’t make it better!  It also doesn’t cover up passive-aggressiveness.    I had a roommate who would leave messages on our whiteboard like, “Put knives down sharp end down in the dishwasher, I like my arteries! :-)  Sugar, clearly you were mad that you were almost cut.  JUST BE MAD!  The emoticon did not make your angry statement less angry!  If you had said that statement in person, I seriously doubt you would have had a smile on your face. 
So everyone, own your emotions and ditch the unnecessary emoticons.  They’re not accomplishing what you think they are.   

No comments:

Post a Comment