Is emoticon usage in decline?

July 30, 2012 2:58 AM

Is emoticon usage in decline for non-personal messages and posts? What replaced emoticons?

It seems to me that it's mostly only personal emails these days that include emoticons, whereas in the past emoticons were often used to indicate humor or sarcasm even in non-personal emails and postings. I suspect that this is a result of emoticons being a way of shoving normal in-person communication through a text interface. As people get more sophisticated about communicating through text the need to make it "like" in-person communication goes away. If you want to be humorous or sarcastic in text, we are becoming sophisticated enough these days to find some way of indicating that in the text itself without resorting to explicitly telling people how to interpret things with emoticons.

posted by molamir to computers & internet (19 answers total)

Or, you've simply gotten to an age where things such as emoticons don't appeal to you (and your peers) so you've stopped using them.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:39 AM on July 30, 2012 [3 favorites]

I sort of agree that a text interface is the key point. I don't think it's ever been quite the same since computer screens moved beyond text mode and started showing graphics. Being able to smuggle in a little 'picture' seems ingenious and satisfying when text is all you've got, but when you can easily stick in any picture you like (and you even get a little graphic substituted for your emoticon automatically half the time) it seems pointless somehow. <: (
posted by Segundus at 3:56 AM on July 30, 2012

I suspect that this is a result of emoticons being a way of shoving normal in-person communication through a text interface.

...we are becoming sophisticated enough these days to find some way of indicating that in the text itself without resorting to explicitly telling people how to interpret things with emoticons.

Or we've just stopped being lazy. People have been communicating formally through text interfaces for a very long time without ever having needed to punctuate how their correspondence is to be interpreted.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 4:11 AM on July 30, 2012 [1 favorite]

What "non-personal" messages? I don't recall that in 15 years of my own experience non-personal messages using emoticons very much anyway, much less that it has declined significantly. Even when I was working as a high school intern in a professional setting in 1999, it would have been poor form to put emotions on our website or in emails.

I still see plenty of emoticon use in more personal/informal settings (FB, Twitter, etc.).
posted by asciident at 4:29 AM on July 30, 2012 [8 favorites]

I think emoticons have been pretty much replaced with text messaging acronyms.
posted by KogeLiz at 4:29 AM on July 30, 2012 [2 favorites]

I think emoticons have been pretty much replaced with text messaging acronyms.

I think this is part of it. ":)" has been replaced by "LOL" to indicate levity. This is incorrect, in my opinion, as LOL was originally meant to let the other person know you were literally laughing out loud at something they said. When I see someone adding LOL to their own text, it makes me think they are maniacal.
posted by The Deej at 5:09 AM on July 30, 2012 [16 favorites]

Any chance this is because you're getting older? Granted you don't see many non-personal emails as a high schooler, but I'm 28 and I know the people I know younger than I am's (early 20s) emails are far more likely to be an incomprehensible mixture of emoticons and text acronyms as compared to people my age.

I think that what has "replaced" emoticons is what preceded emoticons, namely written language that's clear enough to get your meaning across. People's increased comfort with electronic communication has also probably facilitated using electronic communication in more standard ways. Letters never required emoticons, and if you start seeing emails as genuinely just another type of letter, there's no reason for it to need them either.

N.B.: I try to use correct punctuation in text messages, so it's possible I'm just a stick-in-the-mud.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 5:37 AM on July 30, 2012 [2 favorites]

...whereas in the past emoticons were often used to indicate humor or sarcasm even in non-personal emails and postings

I would have to disagree with this. In my experience Emoticon have always been strictly Personal messages only.

In any business or vaguely formal setting I think they have been always frowned upon as in poor taste or childish.
posted by mary8nne at 6:07 AM on July 30, 2012 [1 favorite]

I don't know that emoticons were ever used widely in professional messages.
posted by J. Wilson at 6:32 AM on July 30, 2012

I don't know that emoticons were ever used widely in professional messages.

Maybe in the very early days of the Internet. They VERY quickly came to be seen as unprofessional, though.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:24 AM on July 30, 2012

The proliferation of emoticons has tapered off, but I still see the basics of both Western and Eastern expressions such as :) and XD used pretty widely -- more in person-to-person correspondence like chat and email than in blogging or site comments/discussion. Is this what you meant by personal vs. non-personal?

What came before emoticons was emoting and gesturing between brackets or asterisks. (Related: indicating actions with a forward slash.) The direct equivalent to :) was , which liberally peppered casual online communications, often abbreviated as .

The convention of initialisms and abbreviations has been a mainstay, though the palette of au courant expressions is always shifting.

To those who feel that clear, less lazy, more sophisticated written discourse has replaced emoticons...um, do you know any teenagers?
posted by desuetude at 7:44 AM on July 30, 2012

Let's try that again:

The direct equivalent to :) was [grin], often abbreviated as [g], using the bracketing-punctuation of your choice. Inequality signs were a popular choice for brackets.
posted by desuetude at 7:54 AM on July 30, 2012

I think it's a generational thing (I'm assuming you mean the text :) stuff and not the actual images). I don't see anyone younger than 25 using emoticons; they're all loling and smhing. My 22-year-old sister definitely makes fun of me when I use them, and then I have to remind her I learned to type on a typewriter.
posted by snickerdoodle at 8:52 AM on July 30, 2012

What do you mean "non-personal"? Work? Addressed to a group? If it's the latter, I'd argue that gifs and memes have taken up a lot of the slack left by emoticons. Here's a meme that expresses puzzlement and here's an animated gif that expresses...a lot of things.
posted by the young rope-rider at 9:02 AM on July 30, 2012

There are a lot of people who use the internet and email daily who are ignorant of the whole gif/meme culture. Very few in my office, for example, would recognise a lot of the popular gifs going round, even though there is a lot of image-based joking by e-mail and a lot of Facebook useage. Rage faces? No chance. Of course, this is a group of people in their 20s - 40s, and teenagers generally don't need to communicate formally online.

I wonder if phone use has changed this - it's easier to type thanks to autocorrect, and some phone texting programmes pop a smiley face in for you rather than you needing to type it in in text. Text speak - which was huge here in the UK thanks to the popularity of texting, schoolkids were even writing essays in it not long ago - has started to die off, probably also thanks to easier phone typing. It takes less effort to write out what you want to say.
posted by mippy at 9:37 AM on July 30, 2012

I think it's a combination of increased comfort with text communication (when I was a kid on the Internet on the early 90s, a lot of people seemed to write in a Deadwoodesque garble of smart-sounding stuff they read in a fantasy novel and fifth grade book report level flailing) and the development of an Internet based dialect that is commonly understood to communicate various moods and inflections. For example, the recent-ish debacle on MetaTalk where someone attempted to politely draw attention to an unsupported assertion by quoting it and adding the comment "[citation needed]", and then a lot of people in the thread were like "wtf that was SO RUDE." In the heyday of emoticons I think that we Internet denizens lacked the shared history to understand a comment like that in a more or less unified way, hence the need for emoticons to provide a little guidance with ambiguous remarks.
posted by milk white peacock at 9:40 AM on July 30, 2012 [2 favorites]

Is emoticon usage in decline for non-personal messages and posts? What replaced emoticons?

This is not a question that can be answered by opinions. You need a massive amount of longitudinal text data (say, a few hundred million words, at least) from a variety of domains (chats, IMs, forums, emails, phones, etc.), a very good tokenizer (that can be made to tokenize punctuation or specifically can be made to tokenize emoticons), and a good corpora-making and corpora-analyzing tool. Anything less is just anecdata and nearly useless. The first step is the hardest: it is incredibly difficult to get a very large balanced corpus of casual text-based communication. Even comparing existing studies is problematic, because to get a sufficient spread of time, you may, in part, have to compare different types of text-entry to each other, which will reduce accuracy. On phones, for example, T9 entry versus slide-out keyboard entry versus touchscreen entry will yield different results in the percent of trasmissions which contain emoticons. You'd really have to control for medium, text-entry method, and age group.

Or we've just stopped being lazy. People have been communicating formally through text interfaces for a very long time without ever having needed to punctuate how their correspondence is to be interpreted.

Emoticons provide what is known as paralinguistic restitution, meaning that add back into a text something that is not otherwise there, usually because of restrictions of space (e.g., Twitter), time (e.g., about to get on a plane), or convenience (e.g., keyboard on phone is really hard to use). They're not about laziness for most users. Emoticons arose out of a natural playfulness with language combined with a need to simply getting a point across while using difficult text-entry systems, in most cases, text-entry systems on mediums that did not exist when our parents were our ages.
posted by Mo Nickels at 1:45 PM on July 30, 2012 [1 favorite]

frankly, i see the opposite. in my work communications i now get a LOT of emoticons and lols coming at me from clients/work people. i think it's abhorrent.
posted by misanthropicsarah at 2:01 PM on July 30, 2012

Actually what's funny is some of the online learning classes at my work still tell us that using emoticons is a good idea to get our meanings across without in-person contact. Um, what?!

But yeah, I don't think anyone uses emoticons professionally any more unless it's to people they already know very well. That and LOL-type stuff make you look like a giggly teenager.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:20 PM on July 30, 2012