As applied linguists we study language in use in different contexts, and my colleagues and I started to get interested in the language being used in new media. So, briefly, how did we go about looking into this? Well, when we started, back in 2003, applications like Facebook or Twitter didn't exist, so we began by looking at text messaging. Data collection was difficult at first because people didn't want to share their personal messages, so we had to ask people we knew—friends and family, mostly. Eventually, we collected a corpus of over 20,000 text messages. This process took about four years in total—a long time. The results showed that people were generally sending fairly long messages. They weren't cutting the messages down or using abbreviations; the important thing was to get their message across correctly. Online communication doesn't give us the possibility of using gesture and other forms of non-verbal communication. What we saw in this study, though, was that people were not using the full range of emoticons; they were mostly only using smiley faces to change the tone of the message or to express irony.