Twenty nine years ago today, the Internet got a whole lot more emotional.
On September 19, 1982, Scott E. Fahlman posted the following message to the Carnegie Mellon computer sceince message boards.
19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman
I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
:-)
Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use:
:-(
With that, the emoticon — emotion in ASCII text form — was born.
After Wired.com’s This Day in Tech wrote about the emotive symbol’s birthday earlier today, Twitter users began a noisy celebration. According to Twitter tracking site Topsy, “Emoticon” has been mentioned nearly 3,000 times today on the social news site. Wired’s post alone saw nearly 1,500 retweets.
Fahlman wasn’t the first to use typeface to represent emotion — that practice goes back hundreds of years, according to Wired. But Fahlman’s was the first to really catch on.
The two simple symbols have spawned a family of related characters that have spread out across hundreds of cultures and languages.
In China, for instance, the character 囧 had been fading into obscurity. But it was given new life online, where Internet users adopted it as an emoticon representing shock or amazement.
And in Japan, Internet users have adopted an entire playbook of faces to use. Back in February, Japanese Web forum Goo polled its readers on their favorite emoticons. They came up with thirty in all, which Japanese culture site What Japan Thinks helpfully translated.
Our favorite? ∩( ・ω・)∩. It means joyful — not much different than Fahlman’s 29-year-old sideways smiley face.
It’s evolution — in emoticon form.
Photo by EscapeArtist74
