When in Doubt, Emoticon

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had little misunderstandings explode into full-blown flame-wars in my e-mail inbox. One second I’m having a polite debate with a friend over the comparative merits of government-sponsored versus third-party payment methods for health coverage or whether Captain Picard was cooler than Captain Kirk on Star Trek (Totally Picard. Totally.), and the next second we’re at each other’s virtual throats.

Later, after an adequate cooling off period, one of us will ask, “Why were you so angry?” and the other will invariably reply, “I thought you were the one who was angry!”

E-mail is cold, impersonal. It doesn’t convey tone of voice or facial expressions. Compound these shortfalls with the fact that the average American adult can only read at an 8th grade level, and it’s easy to see how simple misunderstandings in our digital correspondence can accidentally leave us with hurt feelings.

The solution to this technological sterility and staggeringly sub-standard literacy was to start supplementing our messages with ideograms that communicated visually what text wasn’t linguistically; in other words, we started interjecting smiley-faces everywhere.

: )

According to Yahoo, this year marks the 25th anniversary of the emoticon, but the first emoticon was -) and it meant “tongue in cheek” in 1979, all the way back in those ancient times when the Internet was just a bunch of computers calling each other directly on the phone. So maybe Yahoo isn’t counting that one. It was the “smiley,” the most recognizable of emoticons, which first debuted in 1983.

A picture paints a thousand words, as the saying goes, and emoticons do this in a nearly universal language. People flavor their e-mails with emoticons all over the world. Westerners make their emoticons sideways, eyes followed by a mouth:

: P or : D or :-S

While East Asianers make their emoticons upright, eye, mouth, eye:

(*_*) or <(^_^)>

Cars could use emoticons. When behind the wheel, people tend to become very uncivilized. They exhibit rudeness on the road they would never dare exhibit to pedestrians on the sidewalk. Psychologists hypothesize this has to do with anonymity and impersonal nature of vehicular interactions. We don’t associate a human being with the back-end of the SUV that just cut us off.

Imagine how quickly our anger and resentment at other drivers could be assuaged if they could just flash us a cute embarrassed emoticon on their rear windshield:

(*^_^*)

Awwww… Can’t you just feel all the tension melting away seeing that cute wittle character? It almost makes all that hot coffee spilled into your lap worth it. You can’t make an angry emoticon. It would look too cute.

I’m angry. Grrrr. }:-(

Truly, the world would be a much happier place if everyone simply used more emoticons, online and in real life. The physical act of smiling improves our own moods and the moods of those around us. Like the Chinese proverb says, “The world is like a mirror, smile and it smiles back at you.”