The Socioemotional Thaw
The drive to get more socioemotional mileage out of the keyboard so we can create a human impression online started gathering momentum even in the 1970s. As people began using email and online discussion forums more regularly, they acquired more skill at expressing themselves. About a decade after Hiltz and Turoff finished their study, Ronald Rice and Gail Love looked at socioemotional content in a sample of postings on one of CompuServe's nationwide bulletin boards, using the same category scheme. They found that almost 30% of the messages fell into the socioemotional category, with a surprising 18% in the "shows solidarity" group. People were getting over the early struggles with the new interface and trying to do more than just "get the job done." We adaptable humans are still learning how to thaw the chilly Internet, using whatever tools we can find. Few of us really want to be thought cold, and for good reason, as Asch's studies demonstrated.
Out of this vacuum came the creation of emoticons - those playful combinations of punctuation marks designed to show some facial expression - to add warmth to online communication. In an adolescent way, lying on our sides, we can smile :-), frown :-(, wink ;), and stick our tongues out :P. In Project H, for example, in which researchers are trying to develop a codebook to analyze material from newsgroups and other online discussion forums, 13.4% of a sample of 3,000 posts contained at least one of these graphic accents to enhance the socioemotional content of the message. Linguistic "softeners" atypical of memos or written letters also began appearing online. These are the little expressions we use to add some hesitation or uncertainty to the way we present our views so we will not seem too abrupt and dogmatic. Vocally, we can lift the pitch at the end of a sentence so even a disagreement will sound more like a question. The familiar "y'know" and "like" make any utterance less decisive and bold. Coming from a teenage girl, the remark "Y'know, well, I don't really like like him," is orders of magnitude more complex and subtle compared to its unsoftened version, "I don't like him." Online, abbreviations such as IMHO (in my humble opinion), BTW (by the way), and FWIW (for what it's worth) became part of the lexicon, widely used to ease the brusqueness of a typed message.
Outside of the email world, some environments in the Internet contain even more explicit tools to add socioemotional expressiveness to the online persona, tools that are especially valuable in the socially oriented locales. The synchronous online chats and MUDs offer at least one command people can use to act or emote rather than just speak, and the text that appears on the screen can be clearly distinguished from a phrase meant to be spoken.
In some of the graphical metaworlds where participants appear as avatars, you can click on "happy" to make your graphical persona do an upbeat be-bop dance, or "angry" to make the avatar flail its arms and wave its fists. Some worlds let you choose a sound, such as clapping or a rousing chorus of "Amen," to send over the wires to everyone in the same virtual room.
Though still primitive and blunt, these technological tools are the result of the ineluctable drive to thaw the Internet's icy landscape with nonverbal cues, so we can express ourselves in warmer, more socioemotional ways.
