On Fri, Aug 2, 2013 at 4:05 PM, Jones Beene <jone...@pacbell.net> wrote:
What is often thrown-out to gain a smile can have the opposite effect > without a smiley ... but I was hoping that the insight referred to the > ghost > of Edgar Allan Poe, given that even without the Internet, or rants about > Creationism, Poe's intent was often deliberately hard to distill from the > words. > I don't know if I agree. Often, for example, you write in a slightly facetious manner (in the humorous sense, not the bad sense). It is clear as day when you are doing this. It is clear what most people's intentions are when they write in a humorous register. Smilies are not needed 98 percent of the time, because it is clear what a person's intentions are. I agree that humor over a written medium can be difficult to pick up on, but I think that is mainly at first. The more one becomes familiar with someone (most people, anyway), the more it is easy to pick up on the difference between dry humor, on one hand, and other intentions, on the other. It is the same when interacting with people face to face, actually. Eric
