JPGs just kind of ruined ASCII art, did’nt they?
When I was on 14 baud modems, I hated all pictures. They were ruining the net experience for me.
Are jokes that completely miss the point really that funny?
And I agree that they break up the text too much. With drawing, you immediately zero in on them.
And, no emoticons aren’t necessary, just convenient. You can express these things in text. Sarcasm can be indicated with emphasis or word choice. Emoticons that show you doing something can just be described. “That made me roll my eyes.” Emoticons just make it where you can communicate in pretty much the same way as you would speak, due to the rise of instant informal textual communication.
Way back in the 1990s, I was active on IRC. One of the scripts I wrote was a random emoticon generator: It could produce something like ten thousand different faces, out of various characters. You can’t really do that with smileys.
Do what? Have ten thousand different faces? I’m sure you can. Generate them randomly? Well, no, but randomly assigning facial expressions to words doesn’t seem like a way to enhance understanding.
Yeah, great point.
Did I mean that earnestly, sarcastically, or as a good-natured response to your position?
I think emoticons add a lot of information in a tiny, economical package. Up above, I would have added a [noparse]:)[/noparse] to the post, because I’m trying to make a point without intentionally being dismissive. In the limited texting plans and difficulty of T9 texting in early phones, I’d argue that emoticons were a necessary invention, and now they’re ingrained as part of normal text-based communication.