For many college students, AOL Instant Messenger, GChat, Facebook Chat and cell phone text messaging are the ideal means of communication. They’re fast, simple and unobtrusive in our everyday lives.

Still, for a long time, they have been considered much more… ineffective means of conveying complex ideas, thoughts and emotions. After all, there’s only so much a cutesy, smiley-faced emoticon can say.

According to Cornell researchers, however, that’s simply not the case. Instant messaging can be every bit as evocative as the spoken word.

The Cornell Daily Sun reports:

“We found that the happier people talked more. They tended to use more exclamation points and dot-dot-dots. They were more expressive. The sad people tended to use more negative emotion words, which leaped out as a leakage cue. They didn’t mean to say sad anxiety words but they just leaked out because they were feeling it,” Hancock explained.

Harry Segal, a senior lecturer in psychology, agreed that the perceptiveness of the human mind could pick up on these very small cues.

“If you then limit these subtleties to text then all you have are the words on the page. Nevertheless the sequence of the words, the syntax and the vocabulary choices can be very evocative and people can fall in love with this. I have great faith in the power of written language to be evocative,” Segal said.

Of course, this study assumes instant messengers write in proper English, but as we all know, most do not. Usually, “textspeak” looks something like this: “hai, u goin to the partii lata?” And that’s probably not the best means of expressing anything other than simple ideas.

That said, in the year 2050 when we all have cybernetic implants, we should—theoretically—be fine.