Assignment #1

Whats up. My names Brendan and just to throw the usual information out there I’m going into my senior year as a double major in Communications and AEM. I’ve just recently decided to double major in Communications and AEM so I have a nice amount of Comm classes to make up before I graduate - fun. Much like a large majority of Cornell students I come from the vastly overpopulated section New York known as Long Island. As far as random stuff about me goes, I’m really into anything ocean related (surfing, swimming etc), traveling (I went abroad to London the fall of my junior year and it was the best experience ever, to all underclassman I highly recommend a period of time abroad), and finally weather that isn’t cold (i.e. I hate Cornell’s weather with a dying passion and I cant wait move to like, LA or Miami). I took a class last year called Comm 450: Language and Technology. I found the class surprisingly entertaining and I would like to learn more about CMC and the psychology behind the communication.

An internet related phenomenon that interests me is the use of emoticons within CMC. For Comm 450, my group did an experiment relating the use of emoticons to politeness and I found the entire subject intriguing. I would like to learn more about how users utilize emoticons for various means. In particular, I’m interested in how one can use emoticons in order to alter the messages they send. Emoticons add a vital personal cue to messages based on text and are thus a very important area of CMC. Emoticons are a growing realm of instant messaging due to the lack of emotional cues that exist within the environment. I feel that in the future, emoticons such as basic smiley faces will likely evolve into much more complicated structures.

This interest of mine is located in the synchronous chat area. Emoticons are principally used in instant messaging or in chat rooms which have both been around for a considerable period of time. Instant messaging and chat are synchronous because both offer responses in real time. There really is no other area that emoticons are used in, perhaps email but its usage is less common.