According to Byron (Funell, 2007), when it comes to communicating by email, people have a lot of confidence in the way they interpret the message that they receive. They read too much into the matter; make assumptions and therefore misunderstanding the whole point behind what the sender is trying to say.
This theory was proven by John Kruger and his colleague Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago, who carried out a research to find out the reason behind email miscommunication. It was found that people usually misinterpret the tone of the messages they receive and this is due to their egos where they do not want to let go of their own perceptions and try to understand what the sender might actually be trying to say. (Winerman, 2006)
Email communication is a method widely used around the world because it is fast and efficient to get the message across. But, if everyone’s going to be misinterpreting the messages they receive, there would be a serious problem.
This is what prompted American professor Scott E. Fahlman to come up with what is now called as an emoticon. When communicating by email, one does not have the luxury of having body language or the tone of voice to make out what the other person is trying to say. So, he came up with the idea of using characters or emoticons in a message to indicate the tone of the message. So, if a message was intended to be funny, the character :-) would be used. Similarly, if the message was a bit more serious, the character :-( would be used. (Fahlman, n.d.)
Different types of emoticons(Source: New York Times)
The use of emoticons can be thought of as a bit childish but it could also help when sending business emails as there cannot be room for any misinterpretation when sending such mails. (Kallos, 2008)
References
Fahlman, S n.d., Smiley Lore :), Scott E. Fahlman’s Homepage, viewed 11 November 2008, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm
Funell, A(2007), Emoticons and email etiquette, ABC Radio National, viewed 12 November 2008, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2007/2064342.htm
Kallos, J (2008), Emoticons in Business E-mail, Business E-mail Etiquette, viewed 11 November 2008, http://www.businessemailetiquette.com/?p=293
Winerman, L (2006), E-mails and egos, APA Online, viewed 11 November 2008, http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb06/egos.html
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