Missing the point with messaging

In this case, its with any form of IM or SMS. I’m subscribe to couple of IM services, including ICQ, Yahoo and AIM, via iChat. I’ve also constantly sent and received SMS from friends, and colleagues.
However prevalent these are in modern communication, one fundamental aspect that such communication can presently never exhibit, is emotion. In the future, with the advance in broadband, 3G etc, we might not require short messages and everything can be done with video. But that’s the future.
Here and now, IMs and SMS have been limited in expressing emotions as its purely ASCII characters being transmitted from one end to another. Besides utilising all A-Z and 0-9, we have attempted to transmit bare emotions with , smilies. Besides using colons and brackets, modern IM services added graphical smilies which if we believed what we saw in Forrest Gump, was created when he ran past mud and it got splashed onto a yellow tee.

While with mobile phones, being limited to 160 characters in each message, using two letters to form a smilie would be a real waste. Creative people soon found a single letter substitute, ü . Provides the same as a just that its orientated correctly.
But then, we can only or ü so much in a message but does it transmit what we are actually feeling at that point of time?
I have experienced many times where the words doesn’t really bring out what the sender meant. May it be a happy thought, or a curse. One might read a text message as a scolding, while the sender might sent it as a cautious note. Misunderstandings occur when the right message got received wrongly. So who’s right and who’s wrong?
I chided someone when he message another about an issue. The receiver took offend of the message and said he felt he was being scolded. On the other hand, the sender insists it was just a message to tell him about the issue and the receiver was too sensitive. So who’s right and who’s wrong?
I always try to impress upon others the fact that sometimes IMs or SMSes are just text and one shouldn’t read too much into it. Maybe I should also try not to read too much into other people’s reaction to those messages and save myself the trouble of explaining.
Will we ever get the point of the message?

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