The implications of AIM emoticons

There is not a more common sound heard in a Princeton quad (other than perhaps the beeping of an alarm clock) than the well known AIM noise. AIM (AOL Instant Messenger — as if you didn't already know) has established itself pretty solidly as the lingua franca of Internet communication — in the U.S., at least. Building upon the foundation of millions of customers American Online duped into using its ISP (Internet Service Provider — are these explanations even necessary?), the AIM reached unprecedented supremacy. While AOL's hegemony lasted but a moment in the long history of Al Gore's creation, its successful Instant Messaging service will always be its legacy. Sure they overcharged you, forced you to use an awkward browser with a terrible color scheme and were responsible for the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan comedic extravaganza "You've Got Mail," but in the end wasn't it worth the pain?

As more and more people get online, inevitably more and more people will use instant messengers, leading to an expansion beyond the approximately 100 million users AIM currently has. Instant messaging has not only led to relationships with people that would never have happened without the technology, but also to an added aspect within existing relationships. This aspect is the online persona and is often manifested by the use of Internet slang. You can definitely tell a lot about a person's character by the characters they use to express themselves online.

If spelling is, in some way, a reflection of an accent (affected or not), then the use of color in the online forum is like a mood ring. You can't help but imagine pigtails and bows when you read text against a pink background, just as you can't avoid thinking slightly sinister thoughts when you encounter a black background. Generalizations are rife here, and my rubric may well fail me at the first hurdle. What happens, you ask, if someone has pink text on a black background? Slightly sinister little girl is the result by additive property. But we all make generalizations, so I'd best carry on.

Of course, people change their colorful backgrounds and the types of fonts they use all the time, but this is still a more "permanent" feature than the most notorious extra-lingual feature of IM conversations that I want to discuss. If color is mood, then emoticons are tone. They are used to provide more immediate clarification of someone's emotional state than is provided by the hue of their background. They're most often used in conjunction with particular sentences to modify the original or obvious meaning.

Sounds simple right? I've carefully broken down Internet parlance into easily understandable units and given you a textbook definition of each. But there's one small snag on the emoticon front—they're considered pretty much taboo by most respectable post-ironic Internet users (at least the ones I know). I'd love to hear of people who use emoticons as a serious adjunct to their online conversations. The simplistic response to this scathing assault is to claim it's not the fault of the emoticon, its something more fundamental which leads me to this claim—the triteness of the entire IM medium. Now, while it is true most people use IM to convey fairly mundane ideas such as, "meet me at frist at 8," "what's the answer to number three on the econ problem set?", and "l8tr", there's still no inherent reason that IM conversations should all be this way. And often, they're not.

There is something detached about AIM's 16 available emoticons, including that grinning yellow face. There is something not human about them that drains all credibility from them. It's important to remember that this wasn't always the case; the now familiar jaundiced visage was once an imaginative exercise. People struggled hard, at first, to interpret such combinations of punctuation as ;) and :'( . AOL, not content with having screwed you out of your money during the early years of the Internet, now wants to destroy the imaginative creations of some talented nerds. Away from the mainstream online world there is still much creativity in the production of these symbols. Symbols such as (_8(1) and : )-8-< are out there for your perusal on various websites—it's Homer and Britney, by the way; you'll pick it up.

I suppose it all boils down to originality over polishedness. AIM emoticons are much like Hallmark Cards but even less sincere; nor are they appreciably better than their manual ancestors. Sure, there are some emoticons which I think are original — take Yahoo's range of sexually explicit emoticons, for example — but these are vulgar and uncouth enough to acknowledge their own limitations. Dildos may not transcend language, but they do humorously augment it.

IM conversations do suffer from the lack of vocal intonation inherent in text communication, and it would be nice to have a succinct means of conveying tone to the recipient. But AIM emoticons just won't do; the best they can provide is a slightly funny conversational aside. They are always discontinuous with the rest of the text, and while they do have a tonal effect, it's often a sarcastic one, like affecting an accent or an exaggerated personality. There's something disingenuous about emoticons. Do we really want our thoughts reduced to AIM-generated smiley faces?