Emoticons, those tiny glyphs found in messages all over the world wide web, are aids to understanding. Communication in text lacks the body language and facial expressions that help convey meaning. Emoticon, small glyphs that indicate the emotional overtone of a statement, help replace that lost meaning. They are not unique to computer systems. In the heyday of amateur radio, operators using Morse code would end a humorous comment by sending "HI" to preclude misunderstanding. Modern emoticons may be more elaborate, but they still serve the same purpose.
Emoticons Before Personal Computers
Emoticons existed long before computers sat on desks or laps, when they lived in huge boxes in air-conditioned rooms. These computers were not owned by individuals, but by schools, businesses, research institutions and the government. Smaller institutions leased access to other people's computers. Information was often not even entered in real time. Data was punched into tape or cards off-line and entered later, often by someone else. Without the use of emoticons, the possibilities for misunderstanding proliferated, particularly of comments meant to be humorous, particularly if the humor was of a dry or black nature.
Emoticons were vital even to users who had interactive access to a computer. This usually meant sitting at a keyboard, maybe in another room from the computer and maybe in another state or country. Emoticons were a real help in adding emotional meaning to their input.
These first emoticons did not appear on monitors with cathode ray tubes. They were typed out on a roll of paper on an electromechanical typewriter called a teletype, which was also used for communications. Emoticons may have been pioneered by professional teletype operators as a series of expressive combinations of characters to convey the emotional content of their messages. These few early emoticons developed into the incredible variety we know today.
Early Home Computers
Emoticons arrived on home desktops along with personal computers.. Back then the tiny combinations of characters were called smileys. These emoticons, made up of symbols like and peered at us from green or yellow monochrome screens. ASCII emoticons were perfect for these monitors; they were unable to handle extensive graphics, but they could handle 3:-) devils and O:-) angels with ease.
This generation of emoticon was designed to look like sideways faces. In languages read from left to right, a colon or some other character indicative of eyes comes is the leftmost part of the glyph. The center of emoticons is something representing a nose, often a hyphen. On the far right is a mouth, which may be a smiling parenthesis, a gaping letter O or a frowning square bracket. More elaborate emoticons may employ far more characters, merging eventually into the sort of ASCII art that can be one or more pages in size.
Early emoticons turned up on posts on the dial up bulletin boards operated by schools, businesses, computer clubs or even individuals. As internet access became more widely available, emoticon cropped up on newsgroups, the internet wide forums that covered almost any topic. Emoticon soon migrated to emails, which might seem to be their natural environment. There was no authority assigning meaning to emoticons, but users rapidly learned how to interpret the most common ones.
The nature of emoticons changed with the advent of color monitors and advanced graphics cards. Combinations of ASCII characters just were not enough any more. Web-based message boards, email and chat programs and even word processors started to replace text-based emoticon with graphical versions, often automatically. A user typed the character combination he had been using for years, and watched it morph into a colorful icon, sometimes even an animated one. Emoticons had come of age.
These tiny graphics, also called emoticons, automatically replaced the text a user typed. The collections of emoticons available in these programs became more and more extensive as time passed. Where a user of emoticons might once have been limited to also expressed as and a very few variations, they could now use :confused: or :squint: or :unsure: or even :penguin: if they liked. Emoticons had come of age.
Nowadays emoticons are turned on by default in programs like WordPress and Skype. Users who want the old-fashioned effect of ASCII based smileys have to reset the programs option. Emoticons are the expected norm, and a program that fails to supply them can expect to cause comment by the practice.
Collections of emoticons eventually appeared on-line, made available by the same companies who supplied us with any web graphic of which we could conceive absolutely free. Users could download a set of graphics that matched their taste perfectly. Alternative emoticon sets could be switched in and out according to the users's mood.
Free emoticons sites developed something of a bad reputation, however, because of a few rogues. These unethical sites were pioneers in the distribution of viruses, spyware and malware using graphics as a sort of Trojan Horse. Download became a dirty word is some quarters for quite a while. Emoticons stopped spreading quite so quickly until virus prevention programs, both on servers and on home computers, caught up with the problem.
Today emoticons collections on any imaginable topic are available to help users express not only their emotion but their style. In addition to generic smilies in a variety of colors and styles, there are also collections of dwarfs, aliens, cats, food and anything else a user could imagine. In addition, emoticons based on popular media like television or movies may be available to hardcore fans.
Sets of emoticons can express a user's interest in a wide variety of topics. There are smileys based on ecology, politics, business and any religion one can name. Emoticons can be based on profession, nationality or almost anything else.
Emoticon spread and became more elaborate until users might be puzzled by the meaning of any given glyph. Parents in particular worried that they could not tell what their children were saying online. To deal with this problem, web sites appeared with indexes of smileys. Emoticon of both the graphical and text base natures were indexed. Now users could look up a graphic and tell whether it meant Tongue Tied or Stick Out Tongue, Big Laugh or Big Bang. Emoticons were becoming a culture of their own.
Emoticons are available from a number of sources. Basic sets are distributed with text processing software, like email programs, word processors, chat programs and blogging software. Many web sites, such as web-based message boards and social networking sites, have their own collections. Third party emoticon sets are still available on the internet, but they should still be checked by a good virus program before being installed.
Emoticons are a fascinating study. Their history is the history of our interaction with technology, of our move from a time when personal electronics meant dial telephones, cathode ray televisions, LP turntables and in very lucky homes a microwave oven to the present-day when telephones fit in a pocket, televisions are only a few inches thick and music is a string of bits on any of a variety of devices. They have come with us the whole way, helping us to express our feelings, avoid failures of communication and show how clever we think we are. Truly, emoticons are the signposts of the development of digital culture.