The means and ways people can communicate in this digital age is extremely broad, while this is all good and convenient for us living in the information highway, there are some flaws as to how digital communication is conveyed. As according to Walsh, (2006) a text can convey many different ideas depending on the audience background.
.jpg)
.jpg)
-Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Hotmail almost every college student these days is familiar with these methods of communication
The problem with these digital methods is, they don’t carry over the rich and broad range of expressions that makes up real life speech and conversation. Furthermore different people tend to interpret an email differently and some are unaware of this fact, thinking everyone must have the same interpretation, thus leading to miscommunication and trouble.
Paul Nelson (2009) mentions a recent survey of US companies revealed that 31% of the surveyed U.S companies have terminated an employee for e-mail related issues. 9% because of blogs.
An Idea of a solution
“Emoticon”, said to be invented by Professor Fahlman in Carnegie Mellon University, was originally invented to address online jokes and make it that much less ambiguous.
“made by typing a colon, a hyphen, then a parenthesis; :-) –the first form of emoticon?”
For those of you who love the convenience of online communications, especially chatting programs such as MSN and MIRC, you should be familiar with these cute little faces.
Picture of Msn Emoticons
-emoticons can be as simple as “:)” “:(” , or maybe something more complicated like “(-_-)”, and even more such as these expressions on MSN Messenger
Imagine these examples of a common phrase in the end of an email:
“Please help me”
“Please help me :(”
While it is arguable that different people would interpret this differently. I think most of us can agree that adding the little smiley face in the end would insinuate the atmosphere of a more “friendly request for help”, at the very least, it would sound less serious and less aggressive or “demanding”, especially considering that “please help me” can be said in many ways verbally, each with a slightly different meaning.
My opinion, emoticons are great! I love them :) based on my experience, they help a lot in conveying the right idea, adding the right atmosphere in conversations, making your digital based conversations and email, that much richer. While they can’t completely replace all the rich elements of your real life speech, they definitely help.
REFERENCE LIST:
Walsh. M. 2006, “‘Textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts”, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, Vol. 29, No. 1, p.24-37
No comments:
Post a Comment