Throwing down the gauntlet (smileyface deleted)

[afuna]

I am going to challenge myself to use no emoticons for one week (<3s excluded, because <3s are not emoticons, they are A WAY OF LIFE).


:) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :)
:) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :)
:) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :)
:) :( :) :( :) :( :) :( :) :( :) :( :) :( :)
:( :) :( :) :( :) :( :) :( :) :( :) :( :) :(
:) :( :) :( :) :( :) :( :) :( :) :( :) :( :)
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I am imagining the next seven days without emoticons. My fingers itch already.

Comments

[afuna]

That's the thing -- they creep in. It's insidious!

I feel like I'm using them as a crutch, and I don't like that feeling. I suspect I'm going to fall back onto exclamation points, ellipses, and parenthetical asides (my other crutches...!)

Expounding a bit: I feel as though I'm using them as a shorthand, to hint at my tone, like you said. But since it is difficult to convey emotions through text, any smileys I put in will be interpreted slightly differently by each person who reads my response. So I want to force myself to make sure I'm communicating clearly, with or without smileys, instead of falling back on using smileys (and potentially being misinterpreted).

For example, depending on how well a reader knows me, putting a ":)" in a comment could be read as either friendly, condescending, or passive aggressiveness at work. And removing smileys may not help with that, but the conscious decision not to use them will (hopefully!) force me to actually make sure my words say what I mean, instead of what I want them to mean.

[soph.livejournal.com]

True. Having said that, I tend to interpret them differently depending on the speaker and the sentence in question. So "Thank you for your gift! :)" I'm likely to interpret in a purer way than "Thank you for being a jerk. :)", given that the line itself is being sarcastic, and obviously they're not *really* happy about it. A person's use of these smileys and in what way they use them goes a long way to how I interpret their use by that person.

Of course, that's probably just the way I do things, and others might not be able to do the same.

[afuna]

Yeah, context counts for a lot. OTOH, sometimes the context is unclear, or ambiguous/easy to misinterpret. It really just depends.