Not long ago, while on the MySpace website promoting my latest book :-), I had a disagreement with a complete stranger :-(. Suffice to say it was one of those that happens in cyberspace where communication is hurried and irony tricky to convey ;-). In fact a recent survey in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that while 90% of people who receive e-mails think they’ve interpreted their tone correctly only 50% actually have.

As of the time of writing I am yet to use an emoticon in an e-mail or a text message. I know this probably puts me in the minority, but I am hoping that the above paragraph goes at least some way to explaining the reasons for my resistance.

Who knows: perhaps the little symbols (meaning, respectively, “happy”, “unhappy”, “wink”) I have added enhance your understanding. On the other hand you might, like me, see them as a superfluous affectation.

When widespread use of e-mail began just over a decade ago, one of the things the form was celebrated for was its lack of rules. Unlike letter writing, e-mailing had no custom dictating how a correspondent should begin their missive or sign off. If they wanted to they needn’t even sign off at all.

Now, perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s the same initially lauded freedom that is being called into question. Last week saw the American publication of Send: The Essential Guide to E-mail for Office and Home, a manifesto for more polite cyber correspondence written by Will Schwalbe, the editor-in-chief of Hyperion books, and David Shipley, the opinion page editor of The New York Times.

In a similar spirit, a website part-owned by the creator of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, has posted etiquette guidelines for a more civil blogosphere, including such rules as “We won’t say anything online that we won’t say in person”.

Emoticons — or smileys as they’re sometimes known — are, in theory, another way of softening the frequently harsh and humour-deficient art of cyber chat. Their precise genesis is a cause for debate.

As far back as 1969 Vladimir Nabokov suggested there should be a typographical sign for a smile, but the invention of the :-) and :-( symbols to respectively denote jokes and nonjokes is most widely credited to a computer boffin called Scott Fahlman in 1982.

A smile oils the exchange. As an eBay antiques dealer friend of mine told me recently when I moaned about smiley culture to her: “I sometimes use smileys just to show that I’m being good natured when there’s no other way to do so.”

Two weeks ago computer scientists at Pittsburgh University announced they had developed software enabling people to replace emoticons with a selection of their own real facial expressions. But wouldn’t it be easier just to construct a few articulate sentences and leave it at that?

So what do etiquette maestros Schwalbe and Shipley think of emoticons? “I think a job applicant would be very foolish to pepper his or her CV with winky faces,” Schwalbe tells me. “But they are useful in adding tone when you need to add tone quickly. And given that most of us are getting and sending 50,000 e-mails a year, quick is essential.

“We do come out strongly against using emoticons to take the edge off a barb. ‘My goodness that suit makes you look fat :-)’ is even more cruel with the smiley face than without it. And we do find exclamation points useful for expressing enthusiasm — and figure that the exclamation point is really the best emoticon.”

It’s hard not to see Schwalbe’s point, particularly after receiving a few incredibly polite, conscientious e-mails from him (his e-mail philosophy includes always refreshing the subject line and never cutting an e-mail into bits and answering each part of it in turn, for fear of seeming like you are “barking commands” at your correspondent). But there are few occasions when an exclamation mark won’t do the same job a :-) will with one less press of the shift key.

When I was growing up, some oldies moaned about my friends and I occasionally using words such as “wicked”, “skill” and “cool”. Emoticons and cyber abbreviations like lol (“laugh out loud”, to the blissfully ignorant) have created a much bigger gap in communication. For a concept that’s supposed to simplify and humanise they’re surprisingly elitist.

The physical equivalent of a text message from a heavy emoticon user is not so much a handshake or a high-five as an impromptu display of karate or an advanced game of rock, paper, scissors utilising a variety of mineral matter and the stock of a nearby stationery superstore.

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