Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Check out this column in 8 days...something for ME to think about esp...:PI can't :) without Uby Tommy WeeIt's not even funny anymore. Someone whined in the papers recently about the questionable habit of putting too many smileys :) and LOLs (Laughing Out Loud) in e-mails. I'm like, why stop there? Smileys :) and LOLs creep into SMSes and chat messages, too, don't they? But the most amazing thing about the story was - get this - some people felt that smileys :) are insincere.Honestly, it's 2006. The full-bodied Scarlett Johansson is the Sexiest Woman Alive. Britney is single again. You can get a new nose/boob/jaw during lunch. Global warming might kill us all. If you expect sincerity from a text or a chat message, you may be asking for too much. The whole idea of communicating through computers and gadgets is so that people don't have to face each other. Manage expectations. I can think of many reasons why civilised folks want to put distance between themselves, but doing so to be more sincere is not one of them.I'd be the first to admit that i type 'LOL' with a straight face. I have the same expression when I type 'I'm sorry your dog died'. I'm red-eyed, frowning and, more often than not, sleepy. And I use 'ROFL" without remorse. I don't actually collapse on the office carpet and start Rolling On The Floor Laughing (a good thing, too, since my office carpet is a self-sustaining ecosystem of dirt and bacteria). I'd also be exhausted if I did, because I type 'ROFL', on average, 15 times a day. I must say I'm forced to use 'ROFL' especially if I've typed 'LOL' two lines ago. My writer's instincts forbid me to be repetitive.I have a friend who has a pink, animated smiley (:), but pink and moving) for the word 'ha'. You can imagine how my eyes hurt when she goes 'hahahahaha'. And she laughs a lot. Almost every other damn line. I blocked her eventually. I'm like a brute on MSN, man. I switch my status to "Away' when i'm actually at my desk. I block boring people. Ruthlessly, I put up "Out to Lunch"...at midnight. You get the point. There's no respect whatsoever for the emoticons. Why? Because there are enough rules in life. Asking for sinceriy from someone in front of a computer on the other side of the world/country/cubicle means you have an extremely brittle ego. You're technically begging on someone else's keystrokes.But I see why people love the smiley :). Think about it, the smiley :) is a cop-out for the inarticulate, a knee-jerk reaction for those who hate confrontations. It's an excellent breather for people who are less argumentative than you. I may be overstating the case here, but I think a lot of us, deep down, can't express ourselves properly. When there's no good comeback or opinion, a smiley :) has to do.It might be the ball-breaking dealines but when I'm facing a blank screen and a blinking cursor, I do not possess a single iota of emotion. Every ounce of energy in me is wringing out that desirable turn of phrase, that bulletproof sentence. Emotion clouds the thought process. Emotion wrestles with fact, logic, and accuracy. I can't be laughing (LOL) or sobbing :( or sticking out my tongue acting cute :P every 15 minutes. That's why they're called emoticons- Emotion Icons. Because they emote for us. We're just too darn lazy.I'd like to call this flagrant usage of the smiley :), 'contained hysteria'. It's an extension of our suppressed (and repressed) selves. Emoticons represent the poker faces we wear through the sludge of life, but we yearn continuously to be heard, for our expressions to mean something. We're human, after all. Communication is a basic need. Hence, when we :), we want the whole world to :) with us.Haha, maybe it's cos i use smilies so often, that i feel compelled to dispel the whole 'insincerity' point. I mean, sure, to a certain extent, using smilies at such a high frequency has become a habit, such that my fingers just type it out without much thought sometimes...That much i'll concede. But that doesn't mean that my usage of it has to ALWAYS be without meaning. I sure hope that when i talk on MSN and stuff, it doesn't come across as being 'insincere', so to speak. Of course when i type out ROFL, i can't literally be rolling on the floor laughing. No sane person will do that, not even in normal everyday conversation. Can you imagine talking to someone one minute, and then noticing that that someone is no longer at eye level with you the next, but is instead tumbling around on the ground? BUT that doesn't mean that I won't sincerely be laughing really hard at a certain comment...not to the extent of rofl, sure...but almost there...:PAnd because the format of communication through cyberspace is inherently so detached as compared to face-to-face interactions, smilies actually make these conversations less distant and more personal. After all, expressions and feelings are part and parcel of effective communication. If these are limited through sheer physical distance between two people, then one way in which emotions can be conveyed to the other party will be through smilies. I don't know about other people, but personally, i think writing :) or :D can actually bring a smile to someone's face at a com screen some thousands of kilometres away.-XL :)P.s. I can't believe i'm actually debating about this when i should be studying for exams...haha.
~*4:44 AM*~
