From: Dave Burt <dave@...>
Date: 2004-11-26T05:47:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Email tone (was Re: [Solution] Object Browser (#8))


"James Britt":
> Once upon a time, there was no telephone, nor Internet, nor any electronic 
> means of communication.  People had prolonged, albeit temporally 
> displaced, exchanges using mere text.
>
> I'm fairly certain they managed to convey mirth, anger, leg-pulling, 
> puzzlement, and assorted other mental states with general success, all 
> without the use of smileys or other forms of arbitrary text decoration and 
> punctuation hacks.

They actually followed standards of communication known as natural language 
grammars. This included things like capital letters and regular use of 
punctuation. Fancy.

> I suspect that the telephone has done more to degrade the quality of 
> writing than any electronic tool; people have become so accustomed to 
> relying on tone of voice to convey information that they write as if the 
> sound they hear in their head carries over to the written word.

Very good point.

> If you are being sarcastic, and want people to know it, one clever trick 
> is to write, "I'm being sarcastic."

To me, this defeats the purpose. I really like the idea of this thing being 
a little less explicit. But this almost certainly comes from the "sound they 
hear in their head" you mention in your previous paragraph.

Cheers,
Dave