It’s the 25th anniversary of the smile emoticon. 🙂
Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes — a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis — as a horizontal “smiley face” in a computer message.
[…] Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly. “I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-),” wrote Fahlman. “Read it sideways.”
The suggestion gave computer users a way to convey humor or positive feelings with a smile — or the opposite sentiments by reversing the parenthesis to form a frown.
Carnegie Mellon said Fahlman’s smileys spread from its campus to other universities, then businesses and eventually around the world as the Internet gained popularity.
I’ve participated in endless online debates over whether emoticons are useful, essential elements of online communication, or if they are an abomination in the eyes of God (and Strunk & White). Opponents note that written communication got along fine for centuries without emoticons, through careful word choice. Proponents note that overall volume of written communication has gone up through e-mail and texting, while time available to do it has gone down.
I use them, in casual communication. I don’t in more formal communication, nor in actual “writing.”
Emoticons reflect the likely original purpose of language — to enable people to express emotion, said Clifford Nass, a professor of communications at Stanford University. The emotion behind a written sentence may be hard to discern because emotion is often conveyed through tone of voice, he said.
“What emoticons do is essentially provide a mechanism to transmit emotion when you don’t have the voice,” Nass said.
In some ways, he added, they also give people “the ability not to think as hard about the words they’re using.”
To my mind, a bigger issue with emoticons are the ambiguity of some forms. Everyone has a decent idea of what 🙂 and 🙁 are (we’ll leave aside the profound question of whether a hyphen is a necessary nose marker or not). But once you get into other areas, it gets dicier — especially since ISO hasn’t weighed in on official meanings. Biggest question mark in my mind is: is 😛 a sign of queasy “bleah” unhappiness over a situation, or looney tongue-sticking-out fun? I’ve seen it used both ways, and the interpretation into more graphic icons in programs like Yahoo Instant Messenger doesn’t clarify it any.