Re: Internet fostering linguistics

Posted by Dale on Jan 13, 2002 at 11:50
(204.212.212.14)

Re: Internet fostering linguistics (asdf)

I agree that the possible death of the smiley has been greatly exaggerated.

The new medium is different from writing in its immediacy and changeability, he said, and different from speech in its inability to provide pitch, rhythm, loudness and other voice cues.

And the smiley was created to reduce the drawbacks listed. Humans like progress. They dislike regression. The fact that the Internet allows immediacy and changeability is a benefit and represents progress. That means it will be popular. Phone calls are more popular than writing letters for similar reasons. The inability to provide pitch, rhythm, loudness and other voice cues is a detriment and will result is less popularity unless overcome. The smiley is one way to help overcome these problems. Without the smiley there will either be a replacement method or less popularity of the medium.

The CUL8R crap will disappear because it is cumbersome and will be unneeded in the near future as the interface improves. How soon we forget the Y2K problem. We used 2 digit years because it was too expensive to squander another 2 digits of memory back when memory was expensive. Once we all are wearing the little headset that beams a full screen image directly onto the retina, who will want to waste time saving a few display characters?

The smiley will live as long as we use text and will be obsolete when we go to a full multimedia audio/graphic communications method. And before you think that will be soon, see the movie 2001 and check out those video phones that were available in 1964 but still aren’t popular today and won’t be, I predict, in my lifetime.


Follow Ups:


Post a Followup

Name:
E-Mail:

Subject:
Comments:

[ Forum ] [ New Message ]