Emoticons

Emoticons will speak when you have no words to say...

           I have read the one of the article from IdeaMarketers Website, 'ExpressYour Emotions with Yahoo Messenger Emoticons' by Ray Caban. The author of this article did make point on emoticons in yahoo messenger. In his article, the author has list down some features that offered by yahoo messenger such sharing video, files, photos, games and video calls with friends. To make the chatter’s conversation to be more hilarious, the yahoo messenger service was added with emoticons such as smileys and winks. 

           The author defined about how the emoticons help the yahoo messenger chatters to express their feelings such as happiness, sadness, anger while chatting. The emoticons are divided into graphic emoticons and hidden emoticons. Graphic emoticons reflect to the visual icons which make movements such as dancing, scrolling, jumping and laughing (Luor et al., 2010). While, hidden emoticons reflect to symbol which the chatters can type the shortcut code to display the emoticons (Luor et al., 2010). For example, : ) stand for J. As such, the chatters can understand the emoticons and its can make the conversation more interesting and joyful in yahoo messenger.   

          In my point of view, I’m very happy with this article because I’m also one of the yahoo messenger users. I love to use emoticons because it is help me to express my thoughts and emotions. In very beginning, messages that send are always content with a lot of words and punctuation (Braumann et al., 2009). This can make the conversation between the chatters become very bored and uninteresting. But, once the emoticons are introduced, the messages become a mixture of visual icon and wordings. The presents of emoticons in chatting help chatters to express their thoughts and emotions without wasting time by typing long sentences.

           Other than that, emoticons help the chatters to perceive the meaning that trying to convey by the senders. By sending word messages, there is a chance for the receiver to understand the meaning of the message wrongly. According to Tran et al. (2005) ‘Pure text without emoticons, most cannot identify the correct emotion, behavior and meaning of the sender. In order to that, the use of visual icons together with the text can create more positive attitude than text alone’. Therefore, it is easy to understand a message with emoticons more than wording messages.

           The emoticons in yahoo messengers already become very popular among the internet users and people liked to use it in their daily conversation via yahoo messenger. But, there is a problem occurred when the receiver cannot view the emoticons send by the sender. It was because the receiver did not download the emoticons features. Therefore, to overcome this problem, I suggest the yahoo messenger service should always upgrade their service by automatically attach the emoticons to the yahoo messenger as it will help the users to view the emoticons without downloading it.

     

References

Braumann, E., Preveden, O., Salleem, S., Xu, Y., & T. Koeszegi, S. (2009). The effect of emoticons in synchronous and asynchronous e-negotiations. 113-115.

Luor, T. (., Wu, L.-l., & Lu, H.-P. (2010). The effect of emoticons in simplex and complex task-   oriented communication: An empirical study of instant messaging. Computers in Human     Behavior, Vol.26 , 889-895.

Tran, M. H., Yang, Y., & Raikundalia, G. K. (2005). Supporting awareness in instant messaging: an empirical study and mechanism design. Proceedings of OZCHI , 1-10.