Celebrating the Birth of the Emoticon and its Pictogram Cousin Emoji.

There is a little contention surrounding when the emoticon was first created, and by whom, with the first apparent sighting being in a 1648 poem penned by Robert Herrick. However this is said to be a typo, along with the ‘winking smilie’ President Lincoln was reported to have written into his speech in 1862.

It has been since noted that the first documented sighting of the Smiley and Frowny emoticons that we know and love (?) today was in 1982.

On September 19^th 1982, Scott Fahlman gave birth to two healthy pieces of communication; first came the most renowned Smiley Emoticon, followed closely by his less-loved brother Frowny Emoticon. Their place of birth was the bulletin board of a group of computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon and was meant to help convey tone within the text, as it is today. Fahlman says: “In the same post, I also suggested the use of 🙁 to indicate that a message was meant to be taken seriously, though that symbol quickly evolved into a marker for displeasure, frustration, or anger”. Despite many objections saying the emoticon is childish and detracts from the impact of a post, it is clear the online community needed a way to establish a joke or irritation and so the emoticons spread, evolved, and became a language all of their own.

I don’t know many people who refrain from using the odd smilie or emoticon, personally I spatter them (appropriately) all over my texts and social media posts. The 21^st century is where it all really solidified the status of the emoticon, when its cousin the emoji was born. Emoji means ‘pictogram’, literally: ‘picture (e) letter’ (moji). As some could represent concepts or ideas they are also considered ‘ideograms’. Subsequently people are free to express themselves with dancing ladies, skulls, sushi, and so many more faces than just a smile or a frown. We even have an eye-roll emoji now. Praise be to the God of Passive-Aggression!

So where will it take us next? How many more emoticons and emojis do we need? However loud the luddites cry it seems language and communication cannot help but keep adapting and expanding to fit with the increasingly fast communication we desire. As social media has grown we have surely noticed a need to add to our textual communication? We are all connecting internationally thanks to the internet and it is important to be able to communicate properly. Tone is often lost in the bleakness of text so we need the extra padding to impress on others what we really mean. It is frustrating when arguments start because of miscommunication. As tensions heighten in a comments’ thread, as it can so often do on the internet, it is never a bad idea to insert a smiling pile of poop, or a farting sheep to break the tension. ??