The History of the Emoticon

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Emojis, we use them daily to communicate from texts, emails, and social media posts. These colorful icons, though, have a far more humble a simple beginning as emoticons. Emoticons got their name from emotional icons and were invented on September 19, 1982. At Carnegie Mellon Univeristy Computer Science professor Dr. Scott Fahlman saw a problem in the newly emerging computer forum landscape. Establishing the tone of posts, especially on forums, hadn't yet been mastered. Dr. Fahlman suggested that people use a smiley face :-) to mark joke posts and a frowny face :-( to mark serious posts.

Fahlman students like the idea and used it in their emails, which spread to other universities, which led to more people using them online. Today the school still celebrates the invention of the smiley face with cookie they hand out every September 19th. Students felt that it was a great way to address emotions and tone in the computer landscape. It would allow them to express quickly and clearly the seriousness of their messages. However not everyone felt like emoticons were a good thing, there was a great divide initially about whether they were useful or harmful. Anti-emoticon people claimed that they would hurt the way in which created messages. Some even claimed that make people lazy, they believe that people should learn how to better write messages to convey their feelings. The emoticons would have been a way of cheating, not to mention many considered them to unprofessional and unusable from a business standpoint.

Fast forward nearly 40 years later and the official verdict on emoticons is in! Emoticons are more helpful than harmful, although the critics lost the standpoint about professionalism still stands. On a daily bases, 6 billion emoticons are sent. They have made a huge impact on pop culture and the new generation of emoticons, emojis, have even evaluated the ways we communicate with one another. 😀😁😂😃😄😅😆😇😈😉😊😋😌😍😎😏😐😑😒😓😔😕😖😘😚😛😗😜😝
Edited 3/8/2020

Linked article:https://www.businessinsider.com/emoji-were-invented-33-years-ago-heres-why-theyre-so-crucial-today-2015-9

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