The AFU and Urban Legend Archive
AFU
Smileys
 smileys ray depew




Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
From: rrd@fc.hp.com (Ray Depew)
Subject: Re: maybe emoticons are necessary
Date: Wed, 24 Nov 1993 21:04:39 GMT

Jon poses an interesting question, to which I will respond with more than one typo, I'm sure.

When I discovered AFU, I was delighted (well, chastised at first, then delighted) to find a newsgroup that depended on precise language, not weasly new punctuation, to get participants' points and feelings across. It was like an island in the middle of a sea of smileys, as all the other groups I'd been reading had [censored] and [deleted] sprinkled liberally throughout, with two damaging side effects: first, the message was lost amid all the gratuitous [removed] and [not allowed]; and second, writers were being extremely rude and insulting, and then hiding behind an emoticon. (You know, as if to say "what's the matter? can't you take a joke?")

I understand the original purpose for the critters, and I use them myself on comp.sys.hp48 and elsewhere, but after a while too many of them become tedious and grating, kind of like the Marketing Department's jargon halfway through a 4-hour meeting.

I have noticed on other groups that people tend to hide behind their terminals, and in those cases smileys are necessary as a way to "humanize" the communication, but AFU is so loose and laid-back that I thought we didn't need that kind of crutch.

AFU is not a place where we take things seriously (well, not too seriously) and it should not be necessary to use smileys to remind us of this. Otherwise, let's excise the appropriate line from the Survival Guide. I have a nice sharp axe we can use.

Regards
Ray Depew
rrd@hpfiqa.fc.hp.com


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