Wanted! More Emoticons

I had an avoidable experience recently where a sarcastic comment I made in a chat session was misinterpreted. Not the end of the world, but it did cause some friction that had to eventually be resolved by a painfully lengthy explanation. There are people who just don’t get sarcasm (corporate America seems to be full of them), but I don’t think I was dealing with someone like that. This was just a case of vital information being lost because text based chats can’t convey what the human voice and facial expressions can.

Part of the problem stems from my reluctance to use emoticons to accompany sarcasm. I’m not entirely averse to emoticon use, there are occasions where I think they’re quite useful, for example:

• My dog died of rabies :-(
• But, he bit my ex-girlfriend before he died :-)
• Don't know where he got that idea ;-)

I think the thrust of my argument is that emoticons are aptly named – they are icons (derived from facial expressions) that are used to represent emotions. This is where sarcasm falls through the cracks. Sarcasm is hardly an emotion, one could argue that it’s usually the result of a certain state of mind, but I’d find that state of mind and associated facial expression (if there is one) hard to describe, let alone represent in ASCII. Besides, for sarcasm to work it needs to be subtle, and emoticons are explicit by definition. Emoticons are therefore, in my opinion, the ultimate sarcasm killers.

In addition to the risk of killing the sarcasm, I often worry if I’m not being a little patronizing by accompanying my comment with the appropriate emoticon. I liken it to the “Applause” sign that some TV shows used for studio audiences in the past. Would the other person be thinking “Yeah dude, I know your ass didn't ACTUALLY fall off.."?

Allow me to illustrate the principle with an example. Say your friend just put up a new picture of himself on his law-firm’s web-site and is naively soliciting your opinion on it. And say you’re like me and feel almost obligated to say something disparaging and juvenile in response. Consider the following options:

So, what did you think of my new picture?

• Don’t you have one from before The Accident?
• Don’t you have one from before The Accident? ;-)
• Don’t you have one from before The Accident? Just Kidding.
• Don’t you have one from before The Accident? Just Kidding ;-)

I like the first option the best, the second works, but is less effective. I think Option 3 and Option 4 are both lame and patronizing, albeit very clear. The idea is to elicit one of these reactions:

• Yeah whatever…
• Grow up…
• Why do I bother…?

The kind of response we’re trying to avoid is:

• What accident? I’ve never had an accident.

You want to avoid the several keystrokes it’d take to explain that you know that in fact, there has been no accident, and that you were merely making a joke at his expense by implying that the only reasonable conclusion one could draw from the picture was that events in his recent past also included a badly disfiguring accident.

I think the world is in dire need of an emoticon for sarcasm. Something that’s subtle yet screams disdain. My friend Vaas has some skill at crafting emoticons, let’s hope he finds himself with some spare time on his hands soon, lest the internet lose the gift of sarcasm forever.

In my next post, I’ll discuss why I believe its important for service providers to overcome their reluctance to employ effective route aggregation mechanisms so as to prevent the explosion of /32s in the internet’s BGP and routing tables, especially considering the burgeoning numbers of Broadband and Dial up users worldwide. Just kidding ;-)