Emoticon

Barry Charman

J anet has been rejected again.

I call up my list of emoticons, click on empathise, then scroll through a sub menu to add a mildly scolding face and a half-smiling smiley. If she finds my message to be at all obtuse, she can highlight the icons individually, and read each emotion as a broken down statement.

I wonder if she’ll bother.

Moving on, I visit the hubs I follow daily, and settle into my routine interactions. I read a glib report decrying emoticons as the banal hieroglyphics of the future, and call up the yawn symbol. Click. I then read accounts of the wider world. There is much violence there, naked hatred that walks the old streets. Raw people. Their lives must be so terrible, the emotions so confusing, so erratic.

Sometimes I will pose in front of the mirror, and speculate why my expressions are not the same as my many avatars. I try to contort my features to emulate them, to normalise myself to their smooth emotions. But the results are uncanny. This displeases me. Automatically I reach for a menu to display this, but then remember I am outside of the system, in the real. This gives me goosebumps. I watch as my flesh shivers, and small puckered dots appear on my arms. The symmetry is pleasing, but the sensation is vulgar. I do not control it, no symbol conveys it. The experience is reductive. It cannot be translated non-verbally, it is primitive.

Dismissing these thoughts, I click on the empathy menu and perform my daily search for new emotions. There must never be too many, and I am pleased there is always a carefully maintained number. Today there is a new depressed emoticon. Its expression is clear, the design is clean and simple. Next to this there is an emoticon that is disfigured. This troubles me. It has been deformed intentionally. To convey what? Is disfigurement an emotion? This distresses me because it cannot be clearly understood.

I need to communicate my distress to another; I choose Cody. Cody’s avatar has a soothing green halo. Cody is online. He is part of what I am part of. This is comforting. I type that I am confused by the new emoticons.

After a moment he replies: They are meant to be relatable to people who are disfigured.

I reply: I do not know any disfigured people. Where is the uniformity of this experience? How can I experience it?

He does not reply.

He is green. He is there. But he does not reply.

Agitated, I repeat my query, but he does not reply. I send him a confused emoticon, but he does not reply.

He is being barbaric.

To distract myself from the uncertainty of our exchange, I tour some of my favourite sites. I read an article about the ongoing reduction of dialogue in personal exchanges; one person claims that language is a virus, and acronyms are a new symptom. I find this witty, so I leave a LOL in the comments.

Comforted, I visit another site that I find reassuring, always so neat and carefully laid out. I leave a comment, explaining my confusion about the latest emoticons. Suddenly the feed is littered with a barrage of even newer symbols. I can make no sense of them. One person says this is emoticon roulette, another announces a game of blank emoticon fever. I think these people are radicals. Agitators.

One of them tries to engage with me, bombarding me with inane questions. How does a smile feel? How many tears are enough for a release? They are skin crawlers. Organic ghouls.

I give them nothing, hoping it will starve them.

Aren’t the happiest songs sad? they press. Isn’t tragedy cathartic? I shudder. They are senseless. Beyond that, they have surrendered to a discordant chorus within which they could hear nothing true. They are unpleasant.

Becoming distressed, I leave them to their actions. Despite the new day, the new dawn, they are not wholly disconnected from flesh. Sensation drives them, influences them still. Their thoughts are unstable, I can tell this.

I return to my main friend hub. Janet is green. She welcomes me with a happy emoticon besides a depressed one. This angers me.

I ask: Are you happy or sad?

She replies: I am both.

I stare at this. Explain.

She says: He has come back to me. Even though I know he will break my heart, I put it back in his hands.

I scroll through my emoticon menu, looking for something to counter the cognitive dissonance of her words, but there is nothing. I am upset with her, and with the menu of small round faces. I want to respond with confusion, but I also wish to better externalise my disgust, my anger, my fear, my worry. But sending all is the same as sending none.

My fingers hover over the keys. I remember that article – if language is a virus, if I allow it she will infect me. Prolonged communication is unnecessary. It is not clear. It is not precise.

I think of Janet and her lover. Their intimacy is physical, I know. Two lives sharing one. When their bodies merge, as they must, is there an avatar for this? For the shifting, developing shapes that come? How do they live in such a way? Why is it allowed?

Janet says: Are you happy for me? Her words are provocative, as if I should understand her. Her reactions have become fluid. Fluidity is volatile. Why isn’t she clear?

I say: You ask me to be happy because you are both happy and sad?

She replies: Please.

I reply: You scare me.

She replies: I’m sorry.

I change my halo to red, and I push myself away from my terminal. Just a little way, I do not want to be outside of its glow. I just want a little dark corner to myself, to think. There is not much darkness in my pod, there is nothing unnecessary here.

As infants, they taught us through the emoticons. They taught us to relate through pictures, but they never encouraged us to put the pictures away.

How did people like Janet do it? She thinks it is common, when it is not. I think of those people in the early pods, those very first to withdraw, to find tranquillity. How happy must they have been. How relieved. Strange, to think that people once lived together. That they interlocked. Odd, that some still did.

Janet distracts me. I think again of the warmth she must share – her body connected to another’s – the primitive urges that she is clinging onto. It is good to be more progressive. Still, she confuses, her actions unnerve. I can perceive her unnaturalness, but can think of no symbol to relate it.

This is not relatable, so it must be false.

We were young together, Janet and I, but we are not alike. I do not know her now. I must tell the others. Warn them. Even if I must use words, I am using them for good. Once people know she was lingering – indulging – in flesh, she will be corrected. Their reaction will correct her.

I move deftly through my closest hubs and relay my experience, share her behaviour. Little avatars begin blinking in outrage. The others agree. My friends compliment me on my quick action, my sure thought. I feel a soothing rush of relief. As if I could ever have doubted them.

I sit back and watch as her data is bounced around. As her weakness is pored over. Exposed. It spreads quickly. Her identity. Her errors. Her regressions. No one wants her disruption, so they disrupt her first. Janet’s life unravels rapidly as everyone grabs a thread. The hubs all rejecting her. Sudden isolation will make her indiscrete deviations untenable.

It isn’t judgement. It is sobering intervention. I bathe in the glow of this. It is beautiful to see. To feel. They are grateful. I am loved. Secure. We all nurture each other. Everything wrong will be excised.

Janet tries to contact me, again and again, but I ignore her. We are all together. In harmony. It is so pure.

I go green, and abandon words. I return to my avatars. It is bliss. We are all small round faces. Clear and happy. I am not infected. I am normal. I am natural.

I select a smiley that comforts me, and click.

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