Today’s Hot topic deals with emoticons
What are emoticons?
What are they used for?
How do they affect the meaning in distance education?
Emoticons are ASCII glyphs designed to show an emotional state in plain text messages.
Since computer-mediated communication (CMC) does not have any nonverbal clues, emoticons provide non-textual possibilities.
Here is a 5 minute video for you
WHAT CAN THEY DO?
Emoticons can be used to strengthen information, create mixed messages, show humor or irony or demonstrate mood.
Research says that emotional communication online and offline is surprisingly similar (Daantje Derks, 2007).
Emoticons help make CMC not cold but a very personal medium.
There are only subtle gender differences in emoticon use (Wolf, 2000):
~ Women do not seem to use more emoticons, but they do use them in other ways.
~ Like in FTF women use emoticons more frequently to communicate humor of solidarity, and men use them to display sarcasm (Wolf, 2000)
~ When put in mixed groups (men and women) both males and females display an increase in emoticon use” (Wolf, 2000, p. 831).
~ Males use more emoticons than women in blogs (Huffaker and Calvert, 2005)
~ Men rarely use emoticons in conversation with other men, and use more emoticons when interacting with women (Lee, 2003)
~ Women use the same number of emoticons in conversing with men than with other women (Lee, 2003).
To learn more advanced emoticons watch this amazing video…
not made by me:-(
LAST THING:
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