As an author who has written many articles and a book (with another about to be published) on Netiquette and email, in general, I do not believe that emoticons, email shorthand or emoji are really a part of Netiquette and should rarely, if ever, be used.
However, the article point makes good points. The strongest of these is maintaining good tone.
All I will say here is that if debating emojti usage, err on the side of avoiding them!
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Good Netiquette And A Green Internet To All!
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In
the absence of tone, people read negative tone into it.
By
Bourree Lam
The Atlantic
17 MAY 2015 - 10:44 AM
UPDATED 17 MAY 2015 - 10:45 AM
It wasn’t too long ago that the
exclamation mark was a point of etiquette contention in the world of email and
the workplace. Style and trend pieces wondered: Are
they wildly inappropriate? Are they offensive? What if you just use one?
Language is, of course,
ever-evolving. So now that the exclamation mark has become mostly accepted, what’s next for English?
Emoji.
Not only have emoji arrived,
they’ve arrived at legitimate non-adolescent-filled places such as messages from
parents and emails among co-workers. In one survey, 76
percent of Americans said that they have used emoji in digital communication at
work. Just as it is in the rest of the world,
the most popular emoji in life and work is the happy face.
“The biggest problem about all
electronic communication is that it's toneless. In the absence of tone, people
read negative tone into it.”
Lindsey Pollak, a career coach who works with Millennials,
agrees that emoticons and emoji have gone from being inappropriate for the
workplace to being accepted, largely because the demographic of the workplace
is changing. Millennials are now the biggest generation in
the American workforce, and along with them comes new technology and
mannerisms.
“A
few years ago, emoticons were absolutely seen as very young and very personal,
and not appropriate for the workplace,” says Pollak. “Over the past few years …
I've seen emoticons become more acceptable. I still have very mixed feelings
about the appropriateness, but I certainly see them more frequently not just
from Millennials but from all generations at the workplace.”
But why are people using emoticons
or emoji in the workplace? The answer is that they’re useful. Lauren Collister,
a socio-linguist at the University of Pittsburgh who
studies the interaction of language and society, argues that whether it be
emoticons or emoji—both are doing their part in revolutionizing language.
In emails, Collister says that emoticons and emoji act as discourse particles—a word
that has no semantic meaning but adds intention to a statement.
“People tend to use emoticons
when there's some kind of what linguists call a face threat—something kind of
awkward or potentially offensive, or somebody could take something the wrong
way,” explains Collister. “So people will use emoticons or emoji in these
instances to just add that little bit of extra inflection or discourse particle
information at work too because it's a useful way to communicate.”
It’s for this reason that the
happy-face emoji dominates. As Will Schwalbe, co-author with David Shipley of the classic email etiquette book Send: Why People Email So
Badly and How to Do It Better (sometimes regarded as the “Strunk and White of email”),
explains, “The biggest problem about all electronic communication is that it's
toneless. In the absence of tone, people read negative tone into it.”
“Whether
you're using the exclamation mark, which we called the ‘ur emoticon’, or
emoticons, or emoji, they all serve the same incredibly valuable purpose which
is they take this very dull, flat, affectless form of communication and they
make it cheerful, friendly, they bring a smile … They kick it up a notch,” says
Schwalbe.
A Scandinavian study on
email in the workplace found exactly that: Emoticons in the workplace were not
used to convey emotion, but rather to signal how the information in the email
should be interpreted. They found three primary uses:
to express positive vibes, to mark jokes, and lastly to either strengthen or
soften statements that could be misread as reprimanding. An American study found
that on that last point, smiley faces in email can reduce negative
interpretations.
Along with the usefulness of
emoticons and emoji in clarifying tone in emails, another partial explanation
for the rise of emoji at work is that digital work communication now
incorporates casual communication as well. “In the past email was seen as
more formal just in general—because it's written and it's kind of like a
letter,” says Collister. “But I think that's changing with how we use email for
everything these days.”
“You can make or break a
relationship with one email these days, so you have to be really careful.”
Beyond email, the growing popularity of
office collaboration and communication tools like Slack are increasingly taking
casual work interactions online. “Casual communication is a perfectly valid
type of office communication that's always existed,” says Schwalbe. In the
past, these interactions—whether it’s to tell a joke or ask someone how their
weekend was—were reserved for in-person or on the phone. Nowadays, there’s a
Slack channel for that—whether it’s Game of Thrones fans
or baby photos. This moving of casual office communication online—and therefor
into text—has contributed to people’s comfort level of using emoticons and
emoji with their co-workers.
Stewart Butterfield, the CEO and
co-founder of Slack, says that one of the aims of the tool was let people feel
comfortable with these casual interactions online. "One
of our aims for Slack is to help people 'bring their whole selves to work',”
says Butterfield. “That might sound a little lofty, but we believe there is a widespread
feeling that people are meant to check a lot of stuff at the door when
they arrive at work. Some of that makes sense, but there's a risk of
having people feel diminished or unable to contribute fully—that's the
part we hope Slack can have a shot at correcting."
Pollak, however, warns against being
too casual at work. Her advice is be conscious of who the audience is, and
gauge their comfort level before putting in that emoji. “Frankly, I wouldn't
use a smiley face with any CEO in America. I wouldn't use a smiley face with a
certain level of executive no matter how commonplace and acceptable they've
become,” says Pollak. “You can make or break a relationship
with one email these days, so you have to be really careful.”
In other words, the usual office
rules still applies with emoticons and emoji. For example, don’t use them with
a superior or a client unless they use it first and establish it as an accepted
norm. And never use the
eggplant emoji at work.
“Linguists call this register.
Register is the idea that there's different kinds of language that we use in
different situations. I would never talk the same way to my boss the way I
would talk to my friends at the bar after work,” says Collister.
Never use the eggplant emoji at
work.
In that sense, even as people’s
comfort level with emoticons and emoji in the workplace rises, communications
with co-workers online shouldn’t deviate too far from good colleague behavior offline. Schwalbe’s
advice is just to use common sense.
“No
one likes sarcasm. It's a very bad form of work communication. Using emoji or
emoticons in a sarcastic way is just as bad as it's always has been,” says
Schwalbe. “We should bear in mind that sarcasm existed long before emoji, and
it's always been a bad tactic. We didn't need emoji to be obnoxious.”
This article was originally
published on The Atlantic.
Click here to
view the original. © All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune
Content Agency.
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