:-)

E-mails or electronic mail have become part and parcel of many of our lives. The easiest, quickest and most affordable way of sending messages across cyberspace to friends and loved ones located all over the world. E-mail has also become an indispensible tool for companies to communicate with hundreds of employees at a time, all in a few simple clicks.

Have you checked your mail today?
Source: http://ischool.umd.edu/resources/organizations/ala/images/EmailIcon.jpg

In a similar way that E-mail evolved the way we communicate with one another, it has also altered the way language is used in the context of e-mails and instant messaging in the form of emoticons. Short for emotional icons, emoticons are basically used to denote how a person is feeling in text based messages. Rather than fully articulate one’s feelings, one could just put a smiley in a message to send out a positive message to the reader. Proposed by Scott Fahlman in 1982 on an computer message board to label topics which were deemed funny, the smiley has quickly assimilated itself into an essential part of messages sent online.

Schirato and Yell’s (1996) take on social semiotics is that people assign meaning based on who and where they are, socially and culturally. This is echoed by Halliday & Hasan (1985) when they state that semiotics give meaning to different modes. For example, the typical smiley is made up of a colon, hyphen and a closed bracket which when put together in succession, becomes a :-) . To a person with a traditional background in writing, these symbols mean absolutely nothing other than being punctuation marks, but due to current social and cultural implications, this symbol can be read as a smiling face(upon looking at it sideways).

In my opinion, emoticons are an excellent addition to language as it is an easy to use and universally understood means of communicating emotion on the internet. Michael Krantz (1997) explains that emoticons were invented, because even if people chat online till their fingers become raw, they would not be able to convey emotion as effectively as a face to face conversation.

:-)




References

Kress, Gunther & Theo van Leeuwen (1996): Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge

Halliday, MAK & Hasan, R 1985, Language, context and text: aspects of language in a social semiotic perspective, Deakin University Press, Victoria.

Schirato, T & Yell, S 1996, Communication and cultural literacy: an introduction, Allen & Unwin, NSW, pp. 90-117.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/smiley/

Krantz, M, 1997, Say it with a :), Time Magazine, viewed 10th November 2008