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Originally Posted by Flint
Pro: SMILIES could be an indicator of these non-verbal communication elements, IE “I was only joking” or “Are you crazy?” etc.
Con: SMILIES could be an indicator that people have lost the ability to communicate meanings strictly through the use of the English language.
Given that we have the ability to format text in order to emphasize words approximately the way they would be spoken, I favor the Con position, that is, people would be better served by the use of proper English sentences than by pre-packaged imitations of human emotion. Do poets not express emotion through words?
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I say it's all about the context. Indicators of tone like smilies function rather as
furagana in Japanese comic books -- anything from an indicator of the desired pronunciation of a term written in kanji to something like a footnote, all crammed into the space between lines of text. It can carry parenthetical comments or even convey the punchline to a joke, though Japanese humor tends more to sustained absurdity than to punchlines.
Cold print alone can lead one to some very negative interpretations about your interlocutor, especially in conversational fora like chatrooms, where tone indicators are really needed, especially in a roomful of smartalecks. Now some people deserve every bit of opprobrium you can heap on them, but a great many do not, and it's harder to be sure of this from text alone.
BBS's have a manner of expression that is more like formal composition, in which one may eschew the shorthand of smilies for a more elaborated and precise, less stereotyped mode of expression. Font and color changes are less like composing essays than like composing text for posters. They are effective -- for posters. They don't get used as much because they're more involved and thus less understood by the not-so-savvy users, who are in any case concentrating more on composing the sentences than coloring them.