Expression beyond language

Grammarian Lynne Truss refers to emoticons as a “paltry substitute for expressing oneself properly (Park et al., 2015).” The problem with this claim is that it assumes that expressing oneself properly is actually possible through the means of language and furthermore it assumes language is the only apparatus capable of properly capturing one’s expression. This simply isn’t true. There are infinite subtleties and nuances we as humans cannot tie up neatly with words. It’s naïve to believe otherwise. It would be unwise to dismiss facial expressions during a conversation, so why deprive ourselves of a proxy that allows us to convey our approximate expressions. Choosing to limit ourselves to text when we are messaging puts a wider gap between real life communication and digital communication. Ideally, digital communication should aim to replicate real life communication as closely as possible. Real life is more than language; it is a full sensorial experience.

When approaching my study of the rhetoric emoticons, I immediately thought of my sister. We are very close, but see each other very rarely. That said, we rely heavily on digital communication. We use a lot of emoticons in our conversation, and I felt that our messages were clear evidence of the rhetorical power of emoticons. They always seem to enhance our conversations. Since starting my research on emoticons, I have made an effort to pay attention to whenever emoticons were used in conversations with my sister and what function they serve. I noticed that when my sister used emoticons I found myself picturing my sister’s face more, which made me feel closer to her. Typically when she sent text only I was focused more on the text and how to respond with words.

However, it acts as a good basis for my plans to do an exploratory descriptive case study on the use of emoticons between my sister and me as a promoter of affective social presence. Specifically, as I approach my work with the apparatus of the emoji keyboard, I expect to see evidence of the correlation between the modality of emoticons and perceptions of affective social presence. While this study shows a strong effect of the modality of emoticons in workplace communications, I would think this effect would be even stronger in interpersonal communications that are often more affectively complex, include more tonal nuances, and are far more common than costumer service interactions.

Absence of physical presence

Specifically they focus on adding an affective social presence to costumer service communications, as they cannot logistically create a physical social presence. Often times in life this physical social presence is impossible to have, even with the people we are closest to. The article also mentions that linguist David Crystal sees emoticons as a “crude way of capturing some of the basic features of facial expression” and he maintains that “their semantic role is limited.” Garrison et al. suggest that even a crude substitute brings the instant messaging experience closer to face-to-face communication, and urges that the emoticon is far more complex than we think. Furthermore, perceptions of intimacy may be a mediator between emoticon usage and protection against the negative effects of separation from loved ones. This fully supports my own expectation that emoticons play a role in feeling more connected in long-distance relationships (romantic and platonic). My decision to focus on conversations between my sister and me was based on the fact that we are typically far away from one another and rely more on digital communication. Emoticons are often the easiest way to communicate our feelings quickly so we feel more synchronized and perceive an affective social presence of one another.

Beyond Emotions

I would agree with this sentiment, and further the argument against Crystal’s claims by reminding readers that emoticons have extended beyond facial expressions. There is now a full keyboard including flags, foods and a variety of other objects. This allows for more varied and extensive horizons for those to choose to dive into the world of emoticons. The article also addresses the idea of emoticons as “inventional”. This is certainly something that I will be exploring in my project because my family in general has a very strange and idiosyncratic sense of humor. I have been known among my friends as “an emoticon queen”, but I would attribute this to these inventional uses of emoticons that are very common in my family’s digital dialogue.

In their 2011 article “Conventional Faces: Emoticons in Instant Messaging Discourse”, Garrison et al. discuss the rhetorical significance of using emoticons, particularly in idiosyncratic ways that exist outside the assumed shared body of knowledge employed during emoticon usage.

The Shared Body of Knowledge

The study that the article focuses on the conventions on emoticon use, and the authors maintain after their analyses that instant messaging users are accessing a shared body of knowledge. This shared body of knowledge will be a focus of my project as I look at the effect of generational gaps on emoticon use. As I compare my texting conversations with my sister with those I have had with my mom, this idea of a shared body of knowledge will be evident.

Emotional Synchronicity

Modality is defined by the authors as a “medium’s capacity to transmit multiple cues (pg. 2).” Modality can include a variety of non-verbal cues. In this case they are primarily visual modalities, such as images or emoticons. The authors hypothesized that emoticons would promote affective social presence therein enhancing customer experiences, because they function as an indicator of “socio-emotional tone” and context that would typically be provided in face-to-face communication by body language, facial expressions, and gestures.

Modality promotes immediacy. They found a significant main effect of modality on affective social presence. This modality measure was a composite of all modalities, not emoticons alone, but suggests that the modality of emoticons does have an effect on the the perception of affective social presence.

In Janssen et al.’s 2014 article “How affective technologies can influence intimate interactions and improve social connectedness”, the relationship between emoticon communication and perceived intimacy is explored and results of their study on the subject are reported. The authors emphasize the importance of social connectedness in everyday well-being and combatting loneliness. The findings overwhelmingly affirmed their hypothesis with a very large effect size. Increased emoticon use did lead to reports of higher intimacy in messaging conversations. This suggests that emoticons also may promote better social connectedness, relationship quality, and overall well-being, because perceptions of intimacy are predictors of all these things.

The Ideal for Emotional Synchronicity

Park and Shundar suggest two main apparatus that influence perception of social presence: synchronicity and modality. The authors suggest that synchronicity is the temporal immediacy of communication, so that face-to-face communication has the highest possible synchronicity and digital technologies should aim to mimic this synchronicity as much as possible in order to achieve perceptions of social presence. Affective computing refers primarily to devices that are able to recognize and process emotions. The goal of affective computing is to create an effortless and automatic way of sharing emotions with our social network. This plays into the idea of synchronicity and affective social presence that Park and Shundar stress in their article “Can synchronicity and visual modality enhance social presence in mobile messaging?”. Affective computing is a major trend in the digital industry right now, but it is merely at the precipice. Janssen et al. suggest that the theories of affective computing can also be applied to human-human interaction, both face-to-face and in particular during computer-mediated communication. The study is aimed at using these theories to explore the possibility of automated emotion communication.

Where do emoticons fit in? Human-computer connection.

Conversations with my sister, Natalie:

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Conversations with my mom: