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. poli-tics) interacting with the culture of online postings (e.g. UK, Italy, Swe-den, 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 tech-nology 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 presen-tation of “professional ” selves, and perceptions thereof, we test the hy-potheses 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 in-teractivity across the different group of users and their correlation with emoticon use was explored.