I’ve never used a “smiley face” on my email till today. I was a “smiley face” virgin.

The truth is I never noticed the icon on the tool bar till this morning (embarrassing, huh). I just now clicked on it and it’s pretty cool. Without so much as a word, I can show a variety of emotions — okay, not nuanced emotions but the blunt instruments of amusement, delight, skepticism, and rage. Of course, I don’t know who will take the “angry face” seriously when it comes in a silly little yellow circle. So I suppose that cuts the gamut down considerably to only fairly sanguine feelings: you can’t do rage, just tongue-in-cheek rage.

The concept is thought-provoking. I can sit here blasé and jaded in all my contemptuous glory and let the little legion of faces be my front men. It’s like politics in that regard. I can send messages and negate their literal meaning with a click of the finger: “You’re so dumb. [Smiley face].”

That way I can have it both ways. If they take me literally, and put the worst possible construction on my meaning, it’s their fault because I canceled it out with a smiley face; I’m clean. And it has the beauty of still getting my message across: “You’re dumb.” Or, “You’re a liar.” Yeah, more like politics all the time.

While naysayers may call Facebook.com a distraction for college students, researchers are forging the popular online social network into a new arena for an old question: How do people connect?

By studying the online networking patterns of 1,700 college juniors at an East Coast school (unidentified to preserve the integrity of the project), researchers from Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles, are testing the connection between personal taste and friendship choices. Harvard researcher and associate professor of sociology Jason Kaufman asks, “Do birds of a feather flock together, or do you become more like your friends?”

For researchers, Facebook is a microcosm of larger patterns in human relationships, particularly among young people. This microcosm - with 58 million active users – is currently the sixth-most visited site on the web and continues to grow.

Harvard and UCLA researchers are just one example of many recent academic forages into an otherwise un-academic virtual world. Facebook-oriented research has been conducted or is currently ongoing at institutions like University of Indiana, Northwestern, University of Texas, PennState, and Michigan State University.

This research raises questions about student privacy as well as issues of what is or is not a suitable arena for academic research. Some stricter schools such as Indiana University will not approve research until scholars obtain permission from individuals or the social networking organization itself.

Stephen Salyers, assistant professor of communication at The Kings College and a two-year member of Facebook, told WoW the online community can make the lines between professor and student “a little blurry.” Salyers sees both pros and cons in Facebook research, but emphasizes the inherent problems of trying to clinically dissect a social medium: “It’s completely dependent on what a person offers or creates for their electronic image. … You have to read it in a very sophisticated way.”

The blog statement “Jesus hates religion” is going to get you somewhere with one reader and nowhere with another. (Like the statement “Charles Spurgeon was a world class navel-gazer.”)

So you think about it a minute before hitting “Send.” You consider a fuller, pie-in-the-face-resistant description: “Jesus hates the empty and ritualistic cultic observances falsely called religion.” Even Attila the Hun would be fine with that. But you veto it for its sheer weight.

There is ever the Triangle to keep in mind: the Normative of Scripture truth; the Situational of the reader’s sensibilities; the Existential of one’s conscience.

You remember that Jesus sometimes said relative things in absolute terms, for effect: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). It’s a common enough pedagogical device.

I recently interviewed a seminary professor and asked how he would define “Reformed” to a five year old. He said, “That it’s God who saves us and not ourselves.” Then he hastened to tack on: “Of course, then I would elaborate.”

I knew what he was doing and I told him so, and he smiled and called me perceptive. Then he confided that one is more liable to have one’s words twisted when exactly quoted than when one is paraphrased, because people will take you out of context.

It’s a risk you always take.