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Originally Posted by Flint
Who said anything was "bad" for me? Why do we have to slap value judgments on everything?
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Ahem.
You did. Yes, YOU! - There in the last row, smirking with your gang banger wanna be buddies. And I quote:
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I favor the Con position, that is, people would be better served by the use of proper English sentences than by pre-packaged imitations of human emotion. Do poets not express emotion through words?
Regarding the tendency of people to mask their true emotions, or purposefully express false emotions, this will occur both in real life and on the Internet, however, it shouldn't’t be as easy as clicking a fake emotion-button. That degrades us all, as human beings.
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Saying that something "degrades us all as human beings" is making a value judgment and a negative one, at that - unless you consider it a
good thing for human beings to degrade themselves.
This is not a poetry forum. It is a message board. At times, people
have posted creative works or essays here. I have done so myself, and our esteemed tw is a master of the political essay.
But most of what goes on here is a form of communication between posters. We are not writing works of literature or even technical reports. We are responding to the comments others have made.
In normal human communication, a great deal of what goes on is non verbal. I have never liked talking about serious matters on the telephone, for example, because I want to look the other person in the eye. see what their body posture is, etc.
But even on the telephone, one can hear much just from the person's tone of voice. Is it hesitant. teasing, a whisper, or a scream?
Many message boards or chat groups consider posting in all caps to be the equivalent of yelling at someone. It is a small step from posting in all caps to adding an angry emoticon at the end of your message.
I might equally argue that posting in bold or colored print is a cheap way out and that a good writer should be able to make herself understood without resorting to such subterfuge.
Still, as you have implied earlier, a writer must gear his writing to his audience. If the audience consists of a bunch of high school drop outs with the attention span of a fly, an eloquently worded e-mail in the style of Tolstoy will have little impact on them.
On a message board, the participants are taking part in the new art of written conversation. We can't hear the nuance of the words, and our readers are similarly at loss to hear the inflection in which we respond, thus the emoticon.