Emoticons -)
If you’ve spent more than a couple of days using the Internet as a communication medium, chances are you’ve used an emoticon. One of these :) or maybe a more old-school :-) Email originated around 1965 when people who shared the same computer terminal needed to leave messages for the next person that would be using the same machine. Over the next 10 years computer to computer and email over a network came in to play. Followed closely by mailing lists, usenet, message boards, and instant chat. It wasn’t until around 1979 that the first emoticon came into play -) which represented ‘tongue in cheek’. Some people even used :-) as ‘tongue in cheek’ where the colon represented teeth. It’s strange really, because when I look at :-) I can only see a little smiley face. The teeth, tongue, and cheek are much more obscure. Surprisingly it took several years for the paradigm to shift to a smiley. What spurred on this change were the flame wars. These arguments were regularly being triggered in message boards by people misunderstanding another users intentions.
A while back, when I joined twitter, I found myself quickly throwing in a :) or a :( to qualify my intentions. Sometimes I want to make sure that someone knows that I am making a joke and not being rude. More and more however, I can’t help but go back and remove the smiley and rephrase. I’ve started to feel like smilies are somehow an extension of geek speek and therefore something to be avoided. Good grammer and a clear argument are key to getting your point across. Of course, they always were, but with 140 characthers it seemed pretty difficult. I guess that over time, I’ve learned how to formulate more short and concise thoughts. I can’t imagine discarding the :) or the :( but I have noticed that I am slowly editing them out of my online vocabulary.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 11:08 pm and is filed under 101in1001, Learning, NaBloPoMo, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
