I can’t remember the first time I introduced the tail-end of a parenthetical notation to a colon, but it must have been funny. Why else would I have 🙂 ? I do, however, remember the last time. December 31st, 2009, in the evening. Frustrated by what I saw as the unnatural demise of our ability to convey tone linguistically, my elitist feathers much ruffled by friends I perceived as thinking so little of me as to include a wink behind a well-played taunt, I did what any self-respecting writer would do. I swore off the devil’s plaything for one year. And so began my year without emoticons.
Master of satire, Mark Twain cautions us that “The true and lasting genius of humor does not drag you thus to boxes labeled ‘pathos,’ ‘humor,’ and show you all the mechanism of the inimitable puppets that are going to perform.” And we needed no such demarcations to catch his meaning when he told us that “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds” or that the “The reports of (HIS)death are greatly exaggerated.” I always appreciated Twain’s wit; his humor, masked as sincerity. But Twain never twittered and his access to Facebook was limited. Wry wit like Twain’s is ill-fitted to the shotgun prose that bounces around cyberspace and crackberry correspondence.
Tone takes time, on both the sending and receiving ends. Facebook posts, tweets, texts, and live-chats are not the correspondence of the patient aesthete, but the embattled. They are the automatic weaponry of communication, meant to spray sentiment like shrapnel to audiences far and wide. The point is to get the point across; the quicker the better. Carefully crafted sentences have no place in battles for time and transparency. Musings made of and for dialogic reflection or satirical critique find little audience in a world where communication has become a spastic portal for information-sharing. The slow and alluring literary courtship between craft and content, writer and reader, fingertips and papercuts, has been replaced by wham bam wonder of instant messaging and Twitter-pated patter of tweeting.
There’s little doubt about it. Our appetite for subtlety has waned, replaced by our addiction to the fast-food of syntax, emoti-speak and her super-friends, LOL, LMAO, ROFL, and other such tools for truncating tone. Craft has, it seems, become a matter of utility and utility, increasingly, the value of remote communication. I can’t help but feel a bit 🙁 about this.
But as I do, I find myself unexpectedly — and uncomfortably — empathetic towards those stodgy grammarians, self-appointed chaperones of language, that until recently I’ve made a career of castigating. Those who lament what they see as the ever-hastening decay of quality prose and who fear advances in communication technologies with luddite-like devotion.
As a seasoned professor of writing, I often find myself fending off claims that “today’s youth” don’t know how to write. Emoticons are easy evidence for these claims. But such claims are cyclical and tend to escape the mouths of generations whose popularity has peaked. In 1975, the cover of Newsweek challenged readers to care about “Why Johnny Can’t Write.” Twenty years prior, in 1955, Rudolf Flesch fueled similar public concern with his book Why Johnny Can’t Read. Truth be told, better access to education, more thoughtful pedagogy, our evolving understanding of intelligence(s) and knowledge acquisition, as well as advances in technology have improved literacy rates rather than diminished them.
Language is living creature and the gatekeepers of good writing are often the last to recognize that the caterpillars of communication they’ve been safeguarding have long since turned to butterflies and their fancies to promiscuity rather than proper form. The problem we face isn’t that Johnny can’t write; it’s that Johnny writes with symbols just as effectively as words now and the majority of his readers are growing dependent on them. But, this recent metamorphosis might be no more Kafkaesque than contractions must have felt to those who preferred their words whole. And no harder to compartmentalize and take advantage of if we make use of our new technologies rather than resist them.
In the coming year, instead of fighting off emoticons in my Facebook chat, I think I’ll work more steadfastly on keeping them there. If this year of abstinence and conservation has taught me anything, it’s that what I struggle with is not so much the banal redundancy of a post-clausal wink and smile, but my own lack of proficiency with the mediums that most lend themselves to such tonal adaptations.
Facebook and Twitter, and the emoticoning they encourage, do not prohibit me from crafting e-correspondences that take my readers on long-winded walks through the wilds of wit and promenades through pages of proper prose; they are just a bit more flirty. And since communicative promiscuity leaves only my computer in danger of acquiring a social virus, I see no reason why I shouldn’t indulge in a bit of genre polyamory, now and again, if only to get a :D.
Patricia Malesh is a professor of Communication and the Associate Director of the Program for Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Colorado, Boulder. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
