Enhanced Language :)

Wouldn’t it be great if everyone used emoticons in everyday speech? For those who don’t know what they are (& missed my example in the title), I pity you, because you’ve missed out on a large part of the enhanced language represented on the internet. Why are you reading this online if you don’t know about emoticons, anyway? They are the greatest contribution to communication that the computer has made. I kid you not.
I have good reason for saying this. First some potted history.

Communication developed as an interpersonal skill - face to face (“You have a bug on your nose”, “I’m hungry”) - from what was probably more of a sight-unseen method of communicating (“I’m over here”, “Danger coming”). As we developed from speech into writing & other forms of not-here communication, we added formalisms that made meaning ‘plainer’ when tone & expression weren’t available, but also took away the personality because the communication became one way.

We had developed a form of communication from the empowered to the un-empowered - from the skilled writer to the reading masses, or from the wealthy broadcaster to the listening/watching masses. The telephone was a technology that joined people personally, because it was easy enough to suspend belief & pretend that the other person was in the next room - you could hear them & interact with them, interpret their mood, express yourself, & be fundamentally human - not too dissimilar to the life of a blind person.

What computers & the internet did was allow for peers to communicate without personal contact or sensory input, over wider distances & networks - potentially without meeting each other (ever). It meant that you didn’t know the person at the other end - or even if it was a person (thank you Alan Turing). This was a boon for expanding your social & professional network, but a nightmare for good communication.

The inherent transience (or banality) of the content being communicated led to a dropping of formalisms (poor language skills) as employed by people whose core skill-set did not include communication skills (that is, geeks & academics). I won’t get into ASCII art, because that was merely a consequence of the medium’s limitations, but the medium - text messages - led to a lack of sensory indicators that enhance communication. This gave birth to emoticons - ways of expressing emotion through symbols that are learnt quickly enough & have now become as much of the vocabulary of net-speak as the acronyms commonly used. This then developed into SMS-speak, where a short-hand became an imperative for that size-poor medium.
Enough history. People are now getting so used to (bad) writing as a form of communication, that the interpersonal skills are going downhill fast. It’s ‘easier’ to communicate by message - one-way, short, easy to misinterpret or excuse. People hook-up, break-up, marry, divorce, & carry on a large portion of their business & personal lives through simple, unstructured messages.

The only way to express emotions, without resorting to the old formulaic words for them, is through emoticons. The only way to express tone, such as in the use of sarcasm, is through emoticons. You can safely say something & then mean the opposite by adding two or three extra characters. People who are information workers are beginning to think in terms of emoticons, adding smileys to (offline) birthday cards. That’s the way they express themselves every day.

Way back when Ellen DeGeneres had a sitcom rather than a talk show, there was an episode where her co-worker would hold up a sign to indicate when he was being sarcastic. That’s what emoticons do - they enhance the language with a layer of intent. It shouldn’t be necessary, but the (written) language without emoticons is painfully devoid of any other (subtle) mechanism for indicating tone or expression.

Thus I say with hand on heart that the greatest thing the internet has done to improve communication is through enhancing the language. One day, an offline dictionary will reflect this appropriately. I’m just not sure where “:)” will come in the alphabetised listings - perhaps we need to enhanced the alphabet to include the full ASCII character set - or maybe talk in terms of UTF-8…