Do emoticons make you :-) or :-( ? Whether you like them or not, you probably see emoticons — a portmanteau of “emotion” and “icon” — on a daily basis and thus, can appreciate the history of these quirky communication symbols. Here’s a little explanation, which we thought appropriate since today marks the 30-year anniversary of their first use.
On September 19, 1982, Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, posted the first documented “emoticons” (a happy face and a sad face), formed with a colon, a hyphen and a parentheses. Fahlman explained the need for emoticons thusly:
The problem was that if someone made a sarcastic remark, a few readers would fail to get the joke, and each of them would post a lengthy diatribe in response. That would stir up more people with more responses, and soon the original thread of the discussion was buried. In at least one case, a humorous remark was interpreted by someone as a serious safety warning.
This problem caused some of us to suggest (only half seriously) that maybe it would be a good idea to explicitly mark posts that were not to be taken seriously.
After all, when using text-based online communication, we lack the body language or tone-of-voice cues that convey this information when we talk in person or on the phone. Various “joke markers” were suggested, and in the midst of that discussion, it occurred to me that the character sequence :-) would be an elegant solution — one that could be handled by the ASCII-based computer terminals of the day. So I suggested that.
Here’s Fahlman’s memo from 1982:
But it’s possible that Fahlman actually wasn’t the original pioneer of emoticons. A New York Times transcript of an 1862 speech by Abraham Lincoln includes a :) symbol. Debate has swirled ever since about whether Honest Abe was expressing a wink or if it was just a typo (which is likely the case, however disappointing that may be).
In 1881, not long after Lincoln’s ambiguous emoticon, the team at satirical magazine Puck formed “emotions” with characters, also known as “typographical art,” documented here:
Despite these earlier uses, Fahlman is credited as the “father of the emoticon” for his 1982 memo. But regardless where they came from, we can all agree on one thing: For better or worse, emoticons have permeated both our personal and professional communications. As much of our communication moves online, emoticons can help to convey tone (and as many of us have experienced, passive aggression) in an otherwise hard-to-gauge medium.
In recent years, the popularity of emoticons has encouraged some operating systems to transform plain text emoticons into an animation or image, something that Fahlman thinks “destroys the whimsical element of the original.” And don’t even get him started on the library of shoes, sushi and sun icons known as Emojis, the Japanese illustrations that have usurped emoticons for many tech-savvy typists. Fahlman deems these graphics “ugly,” though he admits that his sentiments may be biased “because I invented the other kind.”
Despite the evolution of symbols and characters and the emergence of new formats and representations, emoticons endure. They’re like modern hieroglyphics, and if you tried hard enough, you could even tell a whole story through emoticons, as this TED talk by Rives does:
as presented on http://mashable.com/
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