Slashdot Mirror
Culture Determines Which Emoticon You Use
Ant writes "A LiveScience story discusses the cultural differences in interpreting facial expressions. The article notes that where you come from plays a large role in what part of the human face you use to determine another person's mood. That also includes communicating online with the usages of smiley faces. 'For instance, in Japan, people tend to look to the eyes for emotional cues, whereas Americans tend to look to the mouth, says researcher Masaki Yuki, a behavioral scientist at Hokkaido University in Japan ... In Japan, emoticons tend to emphasize the eyes, such as the happy face (^_^) and the sad face (;_;). "After seeing the difference between American and Japanese emoticons, it dawned on me that the faces looked exactly like typical American and Japanese smiles," he said.'"
So what culture am I a part of if I want to strangle someone every time they use any kind of emoticon at all?
Well, ain't it obvious? It's not like the Internet is some sort of global village or something...
Oh, wait...
Alas, if you think you saw emoticons, just google for Shift_JIS art, especially of the 2chan kind (there's some on en.wiki, but it's mostly the copy-pasted stuff). For what I know, that BBS is, and i quote, "f*****g huge". It's more than a subculture, but less than a culture of it's own. If i recall correctly, they've even written a book and have their Shift_JIS creatures roaming some japanese TV programs.
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
That's interesting, because when I use emoticons, I generally tend to use the eye-emphasising forms - ^_^, ^.^ or even ^^. In fact, I'm using the first of these considerably less often than the latter two, where the eyes are even more prominent and all other facial features are reduced to just a single dot (representing the nose, in my interpretation) or removed entirely.
:) and so on.
:-) pretty much exclusively and despised the dashless versions, but over time, I first shifted to the dashless versions, and then away from those as well and to the caret emoticons.
It also depends on the context, though; the less personal the context is, the more I tend away from these emoticons. In very formal contexts, I wouldn't use any at all, of course, but in the area between "all emoticons are frowned upon" and "100% personal" (Slashdot would be a good example), I tend more towards things like
Interestingly enough, for me at least, there's also been a definite change over time; back in my BBS/FidoNet days, I used dashed forms like
And I'm not even Japanese. (I'm not a US-American, either, of course, but I think that in terms of fundamental cultural issues like this, US-Americans in general are still close enough to us Europeans for the study to apply to us as well.)
butter the donkey
(.)(.)
./ reader and this one always puzzled me.
I am a regular
It would be instructive to consider the Internet's small but active flounder population, whose emoticons look like this:
Notice the distinctive adaptation to a 'flounder-like' way of percieving faces. Of course you may object that internet-using flounders are imaginary. As a matter of fact, that's an objection was raised even by many prominent flounders when the 'unicorn flounder' smiley was first circulated:
-..)
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I'm a young college-aged student, and I've definitely noticed a shift towards Japanese style emoticons like ^_^ from my peers. Even among those who use the "sideways" emoticons, certainly you would never see :-) -- the hyphen is considered superfluous, and a simple :) will do just fine.
:-) style smilies, which seems to really bug a lot of my friends.
Maybe I'm asocial, but because of this I've adopted the "retro"
#include ".signature"
"...the happy face (^_^) [...] it dawned on me that the faces looked exactly like typical [..] Japanese smiles,"
I've never seen a Japanese, or a human being bend his/her eyes in a triangle shape when smiling.
Could it possibly something else?
Japanese animes also show a character who's under stress having a huge cross attached right from his forehead, or suddenly disappearing eyeballs and long black dashes coming out of the characters face. Anyone seen that on an actual real human, or it just me.
Smilies are an art, and while the way they ended up looking depend heavily on the culture of the people producing them (Japanese smilies follow closely the anime drawing style), I think saying they are strictly modeled after actual people crying and smiling is just a bunch of wishful thinking. Check some photos, an Asian guy won't smile quite a lot differently than a European guy.
... can't stop now!
//misses his C64 ///with the BIG ol' 300 baud Vicmodem ///:D
I first saw an emoticon when I started using Quantum Link (AOL before it became AOL.) I was in a chat room and was confused because now and then someone would end their sentence with ":D"
Eventually I had to ask and someone wrote "look at it sideways."
Using a few basic emoticons has become as natural to me as regular punctuation marks, and just like regular punctuation when it is used responsibly it clarifies and enhances communication.
Rules 1 and 2, asshat. :P
It's easy to fake a smile. It's more difficult to fake happiness or amusement shown through the eyes. Some cultures recognise this.
Deleted
I picked that up from Japanese playing FFXI. ^^ is just short form for (^.^)
They really ought to be using more than two characters, to avoid ambiguity. Like this:
OLOLOLOLLOLOL ^^^^^^^^
The goatse emoticon:
(=O=)
or what about
=(3OE)=
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I'm in Korea, not Japan, and they tend to use the Korean alphabet to indicate emoticons (e.g. _ for sad). I think it's fine, but the emoticon is obviously limited in scope because of the need to type in Korean. People writing to me in English still switch into their Korean input for emoticons.
... still related) because five in Thai is pronounced "Ha!" 555 = Ha ha ha!
In Thailand, they use "555" instead of "lol" (I know, not emoticons
Put identity in the browser.
This is a german smiley actually: Ü
(.)(.)(.)
Slashdot: news for Apple. Stuff that Apple.
Emoticons tend to fall into three classes. The first class is the sideways face emoticon, the kind where if you tilt your head to the left, you see a face. eg :-) or 8^\
The second (newer) class of emoticons is the Japanese style, which is a horizontal rendition of the face: O_O (^.^)
The third class is the abbreviation class, which uses abbreviations words, and pseudo html to convey the meaning. eg. ROFL [grin] </sarcasm>
BTW, ROFL means Rolling On Floor, Laughing.When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
After the N+1st flamewar on USENET, it slowly penetrated my conservative neanderthal brain that emoticons might actually have valid use: indicating tone-of-voice. Email/postings (incl /.) are very abbreviated, telegraphic, and intentions can easily be misread. Flamewars often result between participants who fundamentally agree. Homor usually falls flat without much greater context. An emoticon alerts the reader of the tone intended.
So I have come to see emoticons as a second order punctuation. Punctuation separates ideas; emoticons indicate tone. Personally, I very rarely use anything other than :) to indicate [non obvious] humor, irony and sarcasm. I'm not sure where I would use anything else without being totally redundant. For this is a common error -- most people who use emoticons use them excessively, to indicate tone when there could be no other. That is almost as annoying as people who under-utilise emoticons :) [I might have been serious here, but I'm mildly sarcastic]
Ancient Chinese texts have always been written in top-down, right-left fashion, although modern day Chinese is almost always written in horizontal, from left to right. In our case since all kanji, katakana and hiragana are read upright even if the reading direction is horizontal, it makes sense to have upright smilies as well. Furthermore, many Japanese smilies are obvious adaptations of expressive techniques used in comic books/anime. It doesn't surprise me at all why the Japanese smilies and western smilies look so different.