I find it fascinating seeing the use of tone indicators circle around so much back to a similar way that my mom used them in early AOL message board days. Tone indicators are useful to us because they help people read how we are talking and the tone we intend so as to not alarm people when talking online. We don't have the ability to tell if anyone is serious by playful manner of facial and physical expression so they're useful to us online even now!
But the fact that they evolve and change is fun to watch even as I watch it circle around.
So here's some examples of American tone indicators and outside influences to them that I've seen since first being online:
My mom's age- AOL users/early message board system used a fabulously straightforward way of indicating tone:
::::begin sarcasm now::::, ::::laughing::::, ::::shaking my head::::
The usage of colons was an easy way to identify a tone indicator was coming. There was a very limited way of creating text and often message boards did not come equipped with rich text formatting so this was a perfect way to show what you meant. They tended to have indicators fully worded with no short/chatspeak.
Then two things happened near each other- cellphones and rich text formatting being more prominent in online spaces.
Starting with cellphones- when they became a more accessible thing, tone indicators changed and abbreviations of the sayings became prominent, originally known as "chat speak" which began to form much more readily in texts and online. These indicators tended to be indecipherable unless told what they meant and the indicators had to be memorized:
Rofl, lol, smh, istg, wtf, ruok,
These tone indicators persist today, but part of their legacy was the limitation on character counts. Most places had a 140 character limit, meaning you had to get your message across fairly quickly. A way to indicate tone was either go the abbreviation route, or use the rich text editing.
Rich text allowed for italics, bonding and underlining so people could use these tools to indicate tone. These also had to be learned, because not everyone read them the same way and sometimes different places online would have different etiquette on what each tone meant. Freeboards would often have one board to specify what each one was for:
Sarcasm was popularly italicized
Anger was often bolded
Underlining was used often for seriousness
CAPSLOCK WAS YELLING!!!!
BOLDED CAPSLOCK WAS REALLY FUCKING ANGRY!!!
ITALICIZED BOLDED CAPSLOCK WAS A CATACLISMIC EVENT EVEN WITH A PERIOD.
If you had the ability to strike through, it was a whisper or afterthought.
Doubling your rich text with different punctuation could change the tone.
But the internet also let people in America see other people's cultures more readily. We are notoriously bad for teaching about other cultures here but the internet did allow us something fun! An exchange of faces if you will.
In the West, we were using emoticons with other things (note that this was dependent on if it would not work if your HTML or CSS confused the brackets and parentheses etc. as coding):
:), :(, :O, >:(, =), =D, D8, D:<, O_O, ( • )( • ), >.>, 8===D~~~, [̲̅$̲̅(̲̅1̲̅0̲̅)̲̅$̲̅], ಠ__ಠ, ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ,
But now we could see that other people were making faces in different ways and the anime crowd caught on very quickly:
OTL, (^_^;), (⁄ ⁄•⁄ω⁄•⁄ ⁄), (/◕ヮ◕)/, \(^o^)/, (✿◠‿◠), ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, (づ ̄ ³ ̄)づ, (OwO), (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻,
Boy do I LOVE emoticon indicators! A lot of them are still used today as well.
And then things shifted again when cellphones gave us emojis! Now tone indicators were colourful!
🥺🤞🙂😔❤️😝🙄😨😱😣💀🤏👍👎🤞
But they were not accessible as easily to PC users so there becomes a nice little divide between who is and isn't using them. Also there are so many now sometimes it's hard to figure out what the intended emotion is, considering they look different on different devices! But the younger age groups of my students are trained on emojis! So much so that if I ask them to draw happiness, they draw the happy emoji.
I'm sure I'm missing a few but right now we've been back to a combined group of tone indicators! Here on tumblr we are using the slash to indicate tone much like the original AOL message board users used the colon and we are shortening the words AND using abbreviations and some write out the whole thing! Its FASCINATING seeing it come full circle.
/gen, /pos, /jk, /srs, /serious, /genuine, /positive, /happy, /encouraging
I just love how languages evolve! 8D
What are some tone indicator trends YOU noticed in your online spaces?
Edit: FIXED all of the stupid phone spelling errors.
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