
     Irony Supplements

     Today smiley scholars (there are already a handful) attribute the
trend to the hybrid quality of e-mail, which at times is less like an
exchange of letters than like a telephone conversation. Without some
device to suggest a tone of voice, they say, e-mail is uniquely ripe for
misunderstanding.   In a computer conversation, "It is difficult for a
sender to convey nuance, communicate a sense of individuality, or
exercise dominance or charisma," write social scientists Lee Sproull of
Boston University and Sara Kiesler of Carnegie Mellon in a study of
"electronic communi- ties" that examines the rise of smileys.

David Gans, an Oakland radio producer and bulletin-board devotee, began
using smileys when he found his "deeply sarcastic" tone was getting lost
in transmission.  "I found that if you're going to say something really
rude, you damn well better defuse it," he says.  Today, he sprinkles his
messages generously with his favorite smiley ("sort of a three quarters
view")  : ^)
Expressing a symbol

     Sometimes the smiley also helps in the difficult business of
flirting via computer.  Consider this exchange on the Well: 

     She: "In general I hate the smell of perfumes and deodorants,
while the smell  of certain people's fresh sweat turns me into a gooey
gibbering mass of slithery  lust." 

   He: "hmmmmm . . . i work out tuesday  and thursday. . . :-)" 

     In the same context, a popular alternative is the "winky" ;-) 

     The world's most elaborate electronic  flirting signal was
invented in 1987 by a  Silicon Valley engineer named Alan Chamberlain.
It drew heavily on the appearance  of its creator's own face. "In those
days I  had my hair real short, I wore shades, I  had a brash "in your
face" personality,"  Mr. Chamberlain recalls. He called his creation the
"kissy" and typed it like this #!^ 

     There are computer users whose faces wrinkle with distaste at the
whole smiley phenomenon.   "I cringe when I see them," says the movie
critic Roger Ebert, a habitue of CompuServe, interviewed via e-mail. On
the other hand, he adds, "smileys might be a real help for today's
students, raised on TV and unskilled at spotting irony without a laugh
track." 

     An even fiercer anti-smiley is the comedian / magician Penn
Jillette, who runs a computer bulletin board with his partner Teller and
writes the "Micro Mephisto" column in PC Computing magazine. His
scornful verdict: "As soon as you put one in you've killed the joke." 
In a recent column, he described the smiley as "the hateful :) which
means 'just kidding' and is used by people who would dot their i's with
little circles and should have their eyes dotted with Drano."

     Ms. Sproull and Ms. Kiesler, the e-mail scholars, discuss a
limitation of smileys in their book "Connections: New Ways of Working in
the Networked Organization."  "Although such cues weakly signal mood,
they are flat and stereotyped. . . . Mild amusement looks no different
from hilarity," the scholars write.   Flat and stereotyped?  Hey Sproull
and Kiesler, do some real research! :-)  Joe Flower, a Sausalito,
Calif., writer, recently sent an electronic message about his brutal
book schedule - "a chapter every ten days, counting weekends and
holidays, for  five months." Then he signed off by  hanging his tongue
out with exhaustion :-+  

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