Yesterday, Engadget published "Please don't send me Smart Replies", an opinion piece on automating communication. One of its key features is being written in AS

Yesterday, Engadget published "Please don't send me Smart Replies", an opinion piece on automating communication. One of its key features is being written in ASCII, which makes use of a standard set of fonts if you don't feel like writing with a real pen for whatever reason. Similar to the ASCII feature in Inbox, it's apparently clever enough re-format lines to fit on different sized screens. While this seems like a neat feature at first, I ultimately wouldn't want any of my friends to use it in a conversation with me. In fact, I'd feel pretty insulted. See, I think having ASCII completely misses the point of a blog post. I can understand using canned characters for article indexes so that a publication can have a consistent style. But for the article itself, then ASCII seems like an unnecessarily lazy way to write a post. In this blog post, for example, Nicole gave a demonstration on how you could use italics to stress particular words or "--" to emulate an em-dash. Are you so devoid of creativity that you can't stylize your text by yourself? Is writing so much of a hassle that you can't use the appropriate characters before posting? Further, I don't care how readable these ASCII posts are: They can never capture the personality and character of a hand written letter. Having the option of ASCII encourages me to give a more straightforward response rather than coming up with something that's perhaps more emblematic of my real personality. It's dehumanizing. But more than that, using ASCII instead of your own lines and curves robs your friend of you. It means that you don't value the friendship enough to fully engage in the conversation. You'd rather have a robot do all the rendering for you instead of spending time and energy on them. That's terrible. I know, I know, ASCII is optional. You don't have to use it. But if we're any kind of friends at all, I sure as hell hope you don't.