Emoticons - Necessary or Irritation?

You know what I mean, I'm sure. You're chatting to some friend on MSN or some other AIM and suddenly you having to decipher hieroglyphics. Emoticons, love them or hate them, they do come in use when trying to give and idea of how you feel on any given subject.

But where do we draw the line? Sure they're sometimes cute, and mostly funny, but is a sentence with more than five emoticons a signal to someone's sanity? Or worse, maturity? When you have to spend a full two minutes trying to figure out what someone has said because they've got more emoticon's than physical words, you begin to wonder. When you find yourself looking through your custom smiley's thinking, "oh I didn't know I had that!", then you wonder what the hell you've got them all for.

While smiley's and emoticons, whatever you prefer to call them, are cute and add a touch of colour to your messages, have they become the graffiti of AIM? I'm no smiley t-totaler either, I regularly use kiss smiley's, winking emoticons and others in my own instant messages. But when they become the message instead of the mere highlighter, I have to wonder whether we becoming intellectually stumped. I'm being harsh, I suppose, on those of us who enjoy the vivid emoticons that fill their messages.

I prefer to write flat text and add smiley's on the end of my sentences, that way everyone can read, without deciphering what I've put.

Even I have too many, ones I hardly ever use and occasionally parade out for my friends to see or steal. Some I've stolen myself from other friends, and I loathe to remove them. The only problem with this electronic hording is that once my computer changes, or crashes all those smiley's go up in smoke and the collection begins again.

Are emoticons AIM graffiti, a peep at the soul of the writer or an unnecessary irritation? Do they give some sort idea of the chatter's psyche? Should we worry that the smiley's we use are mental fingerprints of our messages? Or is this just an over analysis of a shallow topic?

Something I'm pretty good at, over analyzing things. My own particular curse. The writer's bane, maybe? Or is the flowery and blossoming use of smiley's and emoticons just another symptom of the ever decreasing global I.Q? It seems evident that we're all slipping into a degenerate state idiocy? Even the more intelligent have become mentally lazy, our creativity is either psychotically sick or childishly backward. So is emoticons just another evidence of humanities decreasing intelligence?

The answer is in the minds of others, more intelligent than I. Over and out