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Emoticonsciousness

A temporal analysis of emoticon use in Swedish, Italian, German and English asynchronous electronic communication is reported. Emoticons are classified as positive, negative and neutral. Postings to newsgroups over a 66 week period are considered. The aggregate analysis of emoticon use in newsgroups for science and politics tend on the whole to be consistent over the entire time period. Where possible, events that coincide with divergences from trends in language-subject pairs are noted. Political discourse in Italian over the period shows marked use of negative emoticons, and in Swedish, positive emoticons.