Emoticons Signal Expertise in Technical Web Forums

Abstract

Past research has demonstrated intercultural differences in emoticon use with effects of the topic of discourse (e.g. science vs. politics) interacting with the culture of online postings (e.g. UK, Italy, Sweden, Germany). The current research focuses within a discourse, and within a lingua franca for communication, and attempts to assess whether emoticon use varies as a function of user-type within the online context. The online context is a web user-forum associated with a software technology company. The user categories are determined by a few orthogonal classifications: employees, novice users, and experts; recipients of kudos vs. non-recipients of kudos; etc. As part of a developing theory of presentation of ``professional'' selves, and perceptions thereof, we test the hypotheses that kudo recipients deploy markedly fewer negative emoticons than comparison categories and that non-employee experts use markedly more emoticons in general than other categories of forum users. Also interactivity across the different group of users and their correlation with emoticon use was explored.