The Emperor Has No Emoticons

Let me preface this post by saying: every single time I have tried to resolve an inter-personal conflict or issue over email, I have later regretted it.  Let me also preface by saying, This rant is not directed at any particular person.  It's directed at about five very particular people.  Ha.

My long and somewhat tragic history with poorly conceived written correspondence goes back to seventh grade, when a friend and I had a year-long feud through letters.  Imagine, if you will, two teenage girls arguing about everything from the nature of friendship to hair color, in the form of two-page handwritten missives exchanged over the course of months, some of them even mailed to each other during a summer when we were at separate summer camps.  (We put more effort into this fight than many people put into entire marriages.)

The feud ended when I, really enraged, showed one note to another friend.  "Isn't this the most insulting thing you've ever read?" The letter was written in miniscule handwritten letters, in glittery gel pen on black construction paper.  But these artistic choices weren't what offended me. My friend read the letter, handed it back, and said, "Honestly it sounds like she's being really nice and wants things to work."

In my mind, I'd already composed a scathing reply.  I took back the letter and re-read it.  Well-intentioned? Nice? Were we looking at the same text? This was teenage angst, not "To the Lighthouse." How many interpretations were possible?

I didn't write back.  After a brief detente, we resumed being friends and then eventually lost touch.  But in eighth grade something happened that changed the world and ensured that I would never mail such a letter again.

Obviously, I'm talking about the advent of the Internet in our lives.  The Internet has been credited with democratizing everything from banking to literacy to democracy itself.  That's great.  It's also provided us with about 8 million new avenues for passive-aggressive non-communication.

Consider the example of the "amazing friend encounter."  You know what I'm talking about.  This is earth-shattering platonic chemistry. You start talking to someone at a party, not expecting much.  But as the conversation goes on, you realize that you have similar ambitions, you admire each other's wit, you make obscure allusions to Roman history that nobody else understands and/or finds funny.  And you think, we must be friends,  This is fate.  And you part with great intentions, get home, and immediately send a Friend Request, or an email.

"It was really great to meet you last night at Carl's party.  It's rare to meet someone who is as passionate as I am about vintage beer steins.  Let's definitely meet again soon."

No response. And soon enough your early euphoria ebbs, exposing the dry, sandy beaches of humiliation and self-loathing.  Whereas before you were all, "amici aeterni," now you're all, "E tu, Brute?"  And do you really blame them?  It's nearly impossible to tell someone "you're not the one," so how much harder must it be to tell someone, "you're not even one among many"? 

Months later, you run into them again at a party, and scuttle off to your own corner, determined not to make eye contact, consoling yourself with the thought that their new friends are shallow and their clothes are ugly. Or something equally mature.

Of course, this all goes for an even greater toss in the mercurial land of romance.  For example, what to assume when someone doesn't punctuate messages?  Do they simply not care? If a person can't be bothered to insert a semicolon, is he really that into you?  At least you can reassure yourself with the fact that he's not into grammar either. Cold comfort, really.  Thanks to iPhones, we can now have conversations like this:

Friend 1: X doesn't bother to punctuate messages to me.

Friend 2: Let me see. *reads text.  It says something like "r u hr???;!" tries to put a good face on it* Well, it says he was sending from his phone. Excuse the typos, and all that.

Friend 1: But he always used to punctuate his messages.  He had such nice punctuation when we first started dating.

Friend 2: ....

What about when someone doesn't reply to a Facebook message?  What if they replied to a message before?  Were they into you then, and aren't now?  What about the Facebook birthday wish?  Does someone who posts a full "Happy birthday" have better intentions that someone who tosses up the noxious "hbd"?  And what about the no-shows?  They just don't care, right?

E-declarations of devotion, circuitous and tortured as they are, are always, always a bad idea.  Unlike heinous fashion trends such as big hair, shoulder pads or flowered leggings, these e-heart messages were never in style, and thence can never come back in.  I have sent one or two heartfelt messages, each several sentences long, that received one-line replies like, "Don't worry about it! By the way, do you know Mike? He also works in consulting ;)"  What can I say? I'm a glutton for punishment.

And those emoticons!  Is ";)" as cheesy and insincere in emails as a wink would be in person?  Or do we allow for some satiric reserve, the distance implied by the keyboard going from inconvenient to necessary?  Where are the emoticons for the things that really matter? How does one sum up "you rent my heart and destroyed my wellbeing" in a combination of symbols?  ";-noooooooooooo", perhaps?  Or maybe don't bother.

And then of course there's the absurdist "Sorry I just saw this" that arrives weeks, hours or months after a response was called for. This line is almost universally a lie, unless the person you're talking to suffers from some sort of short-term memory loss ala Guy Pearce's character in "Memento." And even then, it's still a lie - the liar just doesn't know it.

Of course, on the Internet we all seem to revert to the same level of maturity we possessed when we first set up an AIM account, using our profiles to exaggerate our age and beauty in the hopes that someone online would fall in love with the real us.  Perhaps in the excess of artifice lies the absence of artifice, but probably  not.  The Internet seems to behave the way a really cheap digital camera does, recasting sentiments that were once grand and sincere as flat and tawdry, leached of all genuine connection to feeling.  "I love you" was once a passionate declaration, along the lines of "I will follow you always" but now, thanks to the Net, we have.  You may love only four or five people in your life, but you can  just about anything.  How convenient.

Of course, I'm not naive enough to believe that the Internet offers us anything other than the opportunity to be more craven than we would be in person, inserting a sort of direct pipeline to the wellspring of cowardice that flows through human nature.  It's not such a bad thing, cowardice, but it's hardly what great civilizations were built on.  Anyone who doubts the ability of the written word to capture - perfect? - real human emotion has never read Emily Dickinson (whose lifestyle, by the way, I'm beginning to envy.)

When it comes to the collaborative sympathetic power of the Internet, the maxim for our online country should be "E Pluribus Asshole."  It turns out that with a million ways to stay in touch, nothing says "I care" like saying "I care"...in person.  But does it have to be?  I can't help but wish, sometimes, for greater sincerity, an acknowledgment that what we type is not mere bullshit to be forgotten but rather the words that sum up who we are.  I suppose most people simply do not care about words as much as I do; it's true that I spend far too much time thinking about what I and other people write.

But then I think about how, generations from now, these may be all the marks we'll leave.  Nobody writes, nobody sends letters.  Will the Internet one day serve as some archive of how we really felt about each other?

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This is my personal blog.  I blog professionally about trends in digital media and entrepreneurship over here.  Read those posts, you might just  them.  Insert ironic smiley.