:) – The Semiotics of an Emoticon

05 Dec 2001

Introduction

Computer-mediated communication has taken over an important role in interaction processes between humans. The technology – as long as video-telephony and other multimedia applications are not taken into account – is often limited to alphanumeric letters, as in chats, newsgroups or email. To compensate the lack of emotional capabilities like mimic and voice, a computer-specific genre of signs emerged: emoticons.

This essay’s aim is to discuss how emoticons operate as means of signification, based on the theoretical concept of semiotics. What is making the :) an expression of emotions, that can be transferred and will be understood by the recipient?

Before going into a more detailed discussion of emoticons, their construction and meaning, I’ll briefly sum up some basic aspects of interpreting signs as meaning-making.

1.1. Signs and meaning

Semiotics is defined as the study of signs and how they operate in the process of making meaning.

“Anything can be a sign as long as someone interprets it as ‘signifying’ something – referring to or standing for something other than itself.” (Chandler, sem02.html)

The sign, an entirely human invention, is an arbitrary constructed interface to reality. It does not have a meaning in itself; its meaning is only created through its cultural context. Signs are generally not interesting in and of themselves, but in terms of what they are standing for. In other words, signs are not data to be verified as to whether they are true or not, but are instead clues about what various things and circumstances could mean. This process of signification, the “translation” from the sign to its meaning, might also be called meaning making.

1.2. The signifier and its cultural borders

According to semiotics, every sign – or everything that is by anyone taken as a sign – consists of two parts. This model was founded by Ferdinand de Saussure and takes into account the “signifier” which is the form of a sign and the “signified”, meaning the concept that the sign stands for.

As mentioned before, the decryption of signs is closely connected to culture. Maybe the easiest example to demonstrate this is the written word as a sign. If a Finn writes “joulupukki”, this is a signifier standing for the concept of Santa Claus. But even though Santa might be well known in most other cultures of this world, only Finnish people will be able to decode this sign. For others, it might just be a nice compilation of letters or – taking analphabets into consideration – not more than a cryptic sign with a lot of lines and two dots.

1.3. Framing and meaning

To conclude this introductory chapter about the sign and its meaning, here’s what we defined so far: a sign is an artificial construct that is used to express and transmit meaning. But most – if not all – signs can only be interpreted correctly in the context of culture. I would like to use Erving Goffman‘s concept of “framing” (Goffman 1974) to exemplify the process of signification in a less abstract way. He describes a cultural system where individuals are framing situations in a certain way to ensure that the recipient can reinterpret the situation and understand it in the same way. Goffman is not a semitoician, but this is exactly, what is going on in the process of meaning-making concerning interaction by signs.

2.1. Emoticons

Although this term is not as well known as the often used descriptive word “smileys”, everybody knows what we are talking about: icons composed of typographic symbols to express emotions and feelings.

Already the term “emoticon” itself expresses, that this is an interesting field to apply semiotics on understanding this phenomenon of computer-mediated communication: it includes the words “emotion” and “icon”, whilst the latter is one of the basic terms of semitoical analysis. So, decoding this word, we have an iconically encoded emotion. Would there be a better example to discuss some basic aspects of semiotics?

2.2. The denotation of :)

The sign :) represents a smiling face. There are two eyes and a smiling mouth. In communication networks, this sign is used to add some positive emotion to a sentence.

An interesting question is, whether this sign is interpreted as a smiling face also by people who have never seen it before? In fact it’s nothing else than a double-dot and a closing bracket. As the “lavatory”-symbol discussed in Chandler’s discussion about “signs” (Chandler, sem02.html), this might be not purely iconic, but also symbolic – whereas symbolic means that it is another sign in itself.

“However pure iconography is not possible, as icons have to present themselves as such, to display their own icon-ness. A sign is not iconic until the interpreter recognizes it as such.” (Codognet, chapter IV)

In brief: to understand the :) as a smiling face, we first have to decode the combination of : and ) as a face. The meaning of the sign is not necessarily clear to people that are not using text-based, computer-mediated communication. On the other hand it’s common sense in the “network culture”, and users of these services will also easily understand any variations of the icon, as ;), :( or :P.

The :) is iconic, as it shows a simplified human face which can be signified by resemblance. But it gets its meaning by convention: it has been defined by common sense as referring to a human face. (terminology: Danesi 1994, p.31)

2.3. Connotating :)

Once the “framing” is correctly decoded, the next step to be analysed is the connotation of the :). It’s a smile, which suggests that the writer is in some way happy. At least it can be said that it is in first instance a positive signal, not at all a negative one.

So, analysing the connotation of the emoticon we set it on one level with human mimic which it claims to replace. In the connotation, we still haven’t entirely decoded the sign. We left the stage of analysing the shape of the sign – discovering the : and the ) as a human face as we did in the process of denotation – and have taken a first step towards encoding its meaning, by analysing the obvious part of the message.

It’s an obvious code, that a smiling face is a positive sign. But still, a :) integrated in a sentence has to have some deeper meaning than just “I am happy”. To discover these, the results that we got so far from denotation and connotation are not sufficient. We need to further apply the concept of myth:

“The first (denotative) order (or level) of signification is seen as primarily representational and relatively self-contained. The second (connotative) order of signification reflects ‘expressive’ values which are attached to a sign. In the third (mythological or ideological) order of signification the sign reflects major culturally-variable concepts underpinning a particular worldview” (Chandler, sem06.html)

2.4. Myth and culture

What happened so far is, that the :) has been decoded as a human face, which is smiling, though implicating some positive signal. But, as we know that this :) is used as an essential element of texts in computer-mediated communication, there must be something more to discover than just “the writer is happy”. So what does it really mean, and how comes that it is commonly “framed” by the recipient as the writer wants it to be understood?

The key to have the sign :) making meaning lies in myth:

“Myths can be seen as extended metaphors. Like metaphors, myths help us to make sense of our experiences within a culture” (Chandler, sem06.html)

When interpreting the emoticons used in a computer message, they are understood as added features. They are not understood as a simple message “I am happy”, but contextually analysed in two ways: technically and culturally.

In technical context the :) does not appear as having any meaning in itself, but it is considered as a part of the sentence. Same as we are using different tones of our voice or mimics in oral communication, the emoticon adds emotion to the message. This “technical entity” of text and :) is itself contextualized to cultural experience. This means: we know, that a smiling face not necessarily means friendliness or happiness. It might also stand for falseness, a hidden lie, etiquette or simply superficiality.

So, the only way how the smiley is making meaning is by myth. In the two steps before, it is already analysed as a smiling face, but without any meaning. The context (here: myth) is the decisive aspect that makes it not only being a sign, but a meaningful sign.

3. Conclusion

To recapitulate what was said in the beginning: the meaning of a sign is only created in its cultural context. I showed up how the steps of signification work and how signs are constructed and analysed. But the significant element in the semiotical analysis is in the last step described, where the denotated and connotated sign is set into a relation with cultural values and experiences.

To sum up the question of how smileys are operating: I demonstrated that they are being used as substitutes of mimics and gestures, they are signs, which can not definitively be categorized as icons or symbols. But most important of all: they achieve their task to enrich computer-mediated communication with some emotion, even though their success is often being seen critically:

“Messages are written instead of spoken. Nonverbal, gestural and articulatory cues, so important in speech, are missing (the whole notion of emoticons, like the famous “smiley” “:-)” are ways to try to introduce some of those oral contextual features into Net communication, but their success is limited at best).” (Shank 1993)

Literature / Sources: