On Emoticon Flirting

Not to bring down the general caliber of academic discussion currently going on here at Terra Nova, but :).

I recently wrote a feature for a new Village Voice Media pop culture blog I co-anchor called "Top 10 Emoticons for Flirting Online with Minimal Effort."  Silly though the piece may be, it brings up some hopefully interesting points about the shifted meanings of what appear to the untrained eye as simple ASCI faces.  Much like the socially normalizing LOL, which can supposedly save the dignity of even Second Life players sitting naked in their lawn chairs, emoticons take on new, adapted meanings in online, multiuser environments.

Any additional meanings to add?

Comments

[Nicholas Chambers]

1.

I'm definitely with you regarding the "^_^" emoticon. I guess this is what you'd call the "Cuteness Effect" from Marketing or Psychology. It's somewhat bizarre, but it seems to have a "cutising" effect for both male and female chatters, giving a Conan-the-Barbarian-type of bloke the charm of Bambi's rabbit friend.

While somewhat swaying away from the topic, I can't resist asking: Is eFlirting/cs'ing more of a female thing or are the ladies just more honest about it? It might just be my somewhat limited perspective, as I've never conducted any research in this area specifically, but I haven't seen many non-post-puberty men rushing into popular MMOs to flirt. I guess that bashing in orc-skulls is a somewhat stronger motivation to pay 15EUR a month than, say, getting back a couple of lines of erotic output from a virtual playmate. While I won't deny that it's plain and simple evident that there are more than enough men participating in this sort of activities, there doesn't seem to be a very strong tension regarding the matter in the male community, which has been standing out somewhat more in its female counterpart. Do we have any thoughts, statistics or documented research available?

[SusanC]

2.

The mention of "^_^" makes me wonder if there are different emoticons associated with different cultures or languages.

I only have a beginner's knowledge of Japanese, but I've often seen Latin alphabet w used in an emoticon-like way in Japanese-language chat (and where the rest of the sentence was in hiragana/kanji). I have no idea what it means.(I can imagine Japanese speakers trying to look up "LOL" in an English-Japanese dictionary and having similar difficulty).

"^_^" on the other hand, I would associate with English-language, but manga/anime influenced, chat.

[Nicholas Chambers]

3.

The using a single "w" could probably be derrived from their keyboard input method. From what I know, when you type in syllable it automatically gets converted from lation to the corresponding hiragana/katakana. Therefore, if you typed in "LOL" it would convert the "LO" to a kana and leave the "L" in latin. Typing in a single "w" however leaves the font unchanged. My guess is that convinience is the only reason.

A similar case: How do you know that somebody is German? They use the "^^" emote. While anybody with the standart US layout would have to stretch his had to hold "SHIFT" and double tap "6" twice, a user with German keyboard would merely need to press "`" (key before "1") twice. My guess is that the "w" is something similar.

[JNNY]

4.

Two emotions they express most often using emoticons. “Flirting” is the second favorite emotion and next most expressed.Express msn emotions with these love emoticons. Let msn smiley do the talking for you. Maybe you want to flirt with someone you really like or chat someone .
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JNNY

Tennessee Treatment Centers

[JNNY]

5.

Two emotions they express most often using emoticons. “Flirting” is the second favorite emotion and next most expressed.Express msn emotions with these love emoticons. Let msn smiley do the talking for you. Maybe you want to flirt with someone you really like or chat someone .
----------------------------------
JNNY

Tennessee Treatment Centers

[Andy Havens]

6.

I've also had good luck with the "crack babies" series of emoticons. This is advanced flirting, and requires several chats with the very nice set that Bonnie discusses. After you get to cyber first base, however, whip out the crack babies:

O.o = basic, vanilla crack baby
|||O.o||| = crack baby peeping tom
$O.o$ = crack baby with headphones
^O.o^ = elf crack baby

You get the picture. Poor taste? Of course. But 2nd level flirting requires, I think, some common creativity and shared naughtiness.

[Hexahelicene]

7.

@SusanC: I once played a game with a rather large Japanese player base (FFXI), so I picked this up..."w" is the first letter of the Japanese word "warai" (わらい), which means laugh. So, it's their version of "lol." (A little ironic, considering your post :) )

--Hex

[n.n]

8.

@SusanC: You're quite right, ^_^ is all but verboten in certain circles these days because, for certain people, it carries the connotation of "I am a white (or otherwise non-Japanese) person who mindlessly adores all things Japanese, but can't be bothered to actually learn about them."

From what I've seen, Japanese netusers have a tendency to use 2-byte "extended" characters a LOT in their smileys. An example is
Σ(°Д°;
which indicates shock, as seen by the "flash" effect (the sigma sign), the peculiar mouth shape, and the sweatdrop (semicolon).

http://club.pep.ne.jp/~hiroette/en/facemarks/ has a useful primer in English, but a far more comprehensive dictionary is available at http://kaokao.shazarn.com/ (machine translation works reasonably well here).

[catherwood]

9.

Here's an easy quick list of the top 30 japanese emoticons in use (although the article is dated from 2006) http://whatjapanthinks.com/2006/08/14/japans-top-thirty-emoticons/ ... and our friend Wikipedia has a base article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon with sections for variations in other cultures/languages and links to several Japanese-specific pages.

[avis bailee]

10.

In my Opinion,Emoticons are those fun animated smiling faces that give instant messaging (IM) users a great way to spice up conversations and show people how they really feel.