Spring 2014

Emoticons

Origins and Evolution

Tim Cumberland

The smiley face and other emoticons are very familiar to many people this day and age. We have come to accept and use them regularly in written communication. Instant messaging is a lean medium of written communication. Emoticons spice this lean medium up by allowing users to express their feelings, or emotions, with more visual interactions. Within social media, emoticons are an essential part of how everyone communicates with each other. As Internet culture rapidly becomes an integral part of our lives, emoticons have evolved and adapted themselves to fit our needs. However, there was a time when if you were to use these emoticons, nobody would understand what it was you were trying to say.

An Impressive and Elusive Origin

Many would agree that emoticons originated when the internet was becoming a huge social phenomenon. In fact, it is generally accepted that Scott Fahlman was the first person on record to use an emoticon. Scott E. Fahlman was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Computer Science. In a message he posted on the general notice board on September 19th, 1982 (11:44), he wrote:

Email from Fahlman with a smiley face and a sad face

This message was thought to be lost for twenty years before it was recovered from an old backup tape. Not long after the message re-surfaced, several versions and variations were created and circulated across the internet. There are other claims Fahlam was not the first one to use it. Based on various reports, Kevin Mackenzie may have been the first person to use the symbol in 1979.

That would make the emoticon just over 30 years old. However, you can trace instances of emoticons in history from 150 years ago!

The “smiley face”, a lasting international symbol of joy, was designed by Harvey Ball in 1963 when he was asked by the State Mutual Life Assurance Company to design a symbol that would boost the morale of the Harvey Ball Smiley Face company’s employees. He designed it in 10 minutes and received a $45 fee (approximately $350 today).

The design was first used on buttons, business cards and posters. Later on, it gained huge popularity in the late 70’s and went on to secure its place in popular culture. Many believed that the ‘smiley face’ was the original motivation for the later development of emoticons. However, no concrete evidence linking the two exists.

Emoticons can be traced back even further than Harvey Ball’s smiley face. See the New York Times transcript from a speech made by Abraham Lincoln in 1862 below.

Notice the text “(applause and laughter ;)”; the is considered to be a wink in today’s emoticon language. However, it is debated whether this is only a typo or actual deliberate use of the emoticon.

Emoticons from 1800s Puck Magazine

Above is an image of an article from 1881. Puck, a U.S. satirical magazine, published four vertical typographical emoticons. They jokingly created these typographical emoticons from a supposed study in passions and emotions. They wanted to show that they were not being out-done by cartoonists.

Evolution

By the late 1990s, emoticons had evolved to become much more than just manipulation of text characters. At the time, the major instant messaging services, such as MSN and Yahoo! Messenger, were racing to create the most versatile and easy to use emoticon system. They took advantage of the new HTML code and flash code that had been developed, and now thousands of emoticons have been created and are used widely across multiple platforms. Shown here is a list of the most popular animated emoticons from Yahoo! Messenger:

Yahoo Messanger Emoticons

Later on, Skype started to run sets of emoticons that did not have any association with facial expressions.

Old Skype Emoticons

These emoticons are sometimes referred to as Western style, as they use the conventional ASCII keyboard characters to create the icons. Variations due to different keyboard layouts are also common. For example, the classic smiley face is very well known to us by :). However, in Scandinavian, =) is definitely the dominant form of the smiley face. Some emoticons may need to be read from right to left and some can only be created and read that way. An example of this is D: which shows shock or disappointment.

Another style of emoticons which has become much more prominent in pop culture is the Japanese style. Emoticons created in this style are often referred to as emojicons. With the double byte character set, Chinese, Korean and Japanese characters can be combined to artistically create many amazing and unique emojicons. The flexibility of these characters gives users the ability to imagine and create accurate (and funny) facial expressions. Here are a few of my personal favourites:

ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ Koala Bear

(｡-_-｡ )人( ｡-_-｡) Together forever, I guess

〆(・∀・＠) Writing notes

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ Flipping table (a very cultured reference to Japanese domestic rage)

ಠ_ಠ Look of disapproval

You can find an endless amount of variations and different emojicons at emojicons.com.

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