🚀 go-pugleaf

In <161@intrbas.UUCP> kenn@intrbas.uucp (Kenneth G. Goutal) writes:

..discussion of desire for experimental data on emotional content, etc, etc
  elided..

>On the other hand, emotional content can be conveyed in words, written
>or otherwise, as I indicated in the first couple of paragraphs of this
>message;  or in ASCII-only non-text, as the crude "emoticons" that have
>been in widespread use in this medium (but not in this newsgroup!!!!!?)
>for many years;  or in detailed, hi-resolution, frequently-updated
>emoticons;  or in the tone of voice and facial expressions in full-
>motion video with sound.

Of course emotional content can be carried by normal text!  Read
any good novels lately?  The problem is that cramming emotional
content into text is very time-consuming--good writing is *hard*.
My image of it is of packing and repacking a suitcase until everything
you want to take fits.  

There seems to be an assumption that conveying emotion can be
made easier by making the bandwidth larger.  That helps to some
extent but I would like to remind everyone that a few people are
much better conversationalists than the rest of us, even when we
all have "full" bandwidth.  

And we sometimes have inappropriate or embarassing emotions that 
we don't want to convey (e.g., this is sure boring, but I better 
continue to listen).  Maybe rather than the picture on/off switch 
for our future videophone-equivalents we'll need a bandwidth slide 
switch (text on one end, full senses on the other end), depending 
on how revealing we want to be :-)

David Dick
Software Innovations, Inc. [the Software Moving Company (sm)]