Conversing via electronic means has exploded in the past decades. In 2008, 11 billion text messages were sent each day worldwide. That figure is dwarfed by the estimated 247 billion e-mails sent daily in 2009. The sheer volume of these single-dimensional messages explains why we believe that the role the emoticon, or “smiley,” plays in electronic conversations is vastly misunderstood and undervalued.
Smileys can unleash a torrent of emotions, as they’re designed to do. Each day, these little conversation helpers add a bit of humor, sadness, or spiciness to trillions of typed words. Quite naturally there are those who oppose the use of emoticons, as this Nov. 30 Salon article, Death To Smiley, in which Mary Williams describes the emoticon as “the rimshot of online communication.”
Yet as the global drums of chat beat louder, there’s no question that the use of emoticons will only grow. That smiley seepage is already evident from studies that report that a quarter of students have used emoticons like smiley faces in their schoolwork, as a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, in partnership with the College Board’s National Commission on Writing discovered in 2008.
About a third added they had used text shortcuts like “LOL” for “laughing out loud” in their schoolwork. Richard Sterling, emeritus executive director of the National Writing Project, believes that as the English language evolves some of these e-mail conventions may well become accepted practice.
And how could one fight the rising chat tide? While only 22% of online users took part in chat rooms or online discussions with other people, according to a Sept. 2005 Pew Research study, equal to 300 million users worldwide today, that finding preceded the global explosion of social networks where the common coin is social interaction.
So how many people use emoticons or smileys in their online communication? One can safely assume that the most engaged IMers, e-mailers and texters, or the top three quintiles (60%), use emoticons to express feelings, often in profound ways.
A 2007 survey of 40,000 Yahoo! Messenger instant-message users supports our belief: 55% reported they used emoticons daily, while nearly 40% of respondents said they first discovered emoticons within the past five years.
According to Wikipedia, text messaging is the most widely used mobile data service, with 74% of all mobile phone users worldwide, or 3.2 billion out of 4.3 subscribers at year-end 2009 being active users of the Short Message Service.
Assuming a 50% duplication between Internet and mobile phone users, we estimate that the global number of emoticon users has surged beyond 1.8 billion. And that estimate is conservative, given that Asians are perhaps the biggest users of emoticons as Apple’s forced addition of smileys for the Japanese iPhone market suggests (and based on our own Tencent QQ forays).
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