Am I the only one to think this? Emoticons (little expressive faces formed from punctuation and other characters) are cute and clever and sometimes remarkably so. But the little graphic things that more recently have replaced them completely defeat this cute cleverness, don’t they?
It’s as though somebody worked out how to integrate small graphics inline with text, and then just had to go find places to put this to use. Like replacing the Mona Lisa with a photograph because it’s more accurate or something. Aren’t these things an elaborate way of making the clever banal?
I sort of agree with the OP, in the sense that the punctuation (as opposed to the graphic) is more . . . textually aesthetic, if you will. Graphic representations will also often break the proper line spacing, as they tend to take up more vertical space.
Note that you can disable smiliies in your own posts here at the SDMB.
I particularly don’t like the ones on Facebook. Their expressions are sort of difficult to discern. The winky face and the ambiguous slanty-mouth guy are nearly indistinguishable from the smiley dude.
When I first saw, on local BBSes in the 1980s, the use of a colon, a hyphen, and a parenthesis to form a smiley face, I thought it was clever; for about the first half dozen or so times I saw it. :-)
To me, it comes across as a rather low-grade joke, that jumped the shark long before most people ever knew of it.
The more modern form, in which an Internet-based medium recognizes and replaces various forms of this original concept with small graphic images seems incredibly lame to me; and it destroys whatever tiny vestige of cleverness the original concept ever had.
Myself, I don’t care much about the text versus graphics… except that over at my own forum, gathering a crowd of funny smileys graphics has its own appeal.
Mostly, though, I think that they’re handy as a stopgap to substitute for facial expressions and tone of voice in text-only internet communications of the less than formal variety.
As a clever joke, they were more or less ruined even before HTML became common. Its neat the first couple times you see it, but three decades later, not so much. Whether they are rendered as pictures of as ascii doesn’t really make a difference.
But the other use of emoticons is to express a sense of the emotional content of a comment in casual text-based communication, where the lack of voice tone, facial expressions and the lack of context can make comments intended as jokes seem malicious. In that case, I think they’re quite useful, whether rendered as text or images.
I think the point has long since stopped being cleverness, but rather part of ordinary communication.
Oh, and shouldn’t your sig be titled, “Five great lies about the Left”? Just sayin’.
Strawmen are fun when you’re talking with other people who buy into the same strawmen you do, but they don’t prepare you for conversation with people who’ve already mastered fire. Welcome to the Dope.
I, obviously, use them all the time because plain text lacks facial expressions and a full description of how I didn’t mean what I said and merely intended it as a mild joke or sly observation both lacks punch and would turn my posts, already too long, into novels. I tried not using them but people started taking me too seriously because they were totally incapable of figuring things out from context or my posting history. Morons.
I’m aware of this rationale for using emoticons/smileys, but to me, it just rings very hollow. As I said, the whole thing seems to me like a rather low-grade joke, and did for a very long time before most people even knew of it. It just seems too silly to have any appropriate place in anything that makes any attempt at being a serious discussion. I can grasp that some see it as a way of saying “I know this is a serious discussion, but the preceding remark was intended in jest.” but I, myself, just can’t see it as anything other than “I don’t care about this entire discussion at all, I don’t take any part of it seriously, so I’m going to insert this silly worn-out joke into it to try to destroy any seriousness that it otherwise might have had.”
smiley! I’ve started using it a lot since I found it.