How much of the fascination with emojis do you think is generational?Įvery generation wants to have their own secret code that shows they’re not the old fuddy-duddies and that their parents won’t understand. Obviously, you can say more things with an emoji, but on the other hand, there’s such a great variety of them that it gets hard to tell what’s being said. So it’s a crude kind of communication, but sometimes that’s just what you need. People have said that it’s sort of like a graphical rimshot - a sign for stop here and laugh. There’s a place for language, and there’s a place for this. I don’t think you can write a love sonnet or something using these. But for conveying very simple things efficiently, that’s what these things are good at. Of course communicating with pictures is hardly a new thing. My friends and I who are computer scientists still use the text ones. And I wouldn’t say emojis have wiped out emoticons I mean, there’s the rebel underground. ![]() But if you ask me, the first emoticon was the exclamation mark, because it was text that conveyed emotion without spelling it out in words. In a way, these all descended from the original thing I did, and I’m the father of all these things. I once in a while get a message from a teenage kid in South America or something complaining that there is no volleyball emoticon and why don’t I tell Apple to fix that. There’s a whole industry out there now coming up with emojis. And then you got the animated ones and the pornographic ones. Then there were more of those, and they started looking like actual chefs and firemen and stupid things. I don’t see any real creativity in making yellow circles with a smiley face. Sometimes it happens in the middle of my computer program too. So I’d type my nice text emoticons, and it would grab them and turn them into something else that I didn’t like. But what was the most annoying was that Microsoft, AOL and others turned on conversion by default. I kind of have an emotional attachment to the original kind. And maybe it’s because I didn’t invent them. I don’t mind that so much, but I don’t particularly like them. Much later, when it became consumer software in the 1990s, you started seeing those awful yellow circles. But the thing developed legs, and within a month, we started seeing people making lists of all the different emoticons.Īnd now they’ve mutated, spawning emojis. We found it 20 years later in the archives. ![]() When I first posted the thing, I had no idea that it would be popular. As soon as there was email, it spread virally. But I thought it would amuse the dozen or so people in that group, but it caught on. And I thought that a smiley face of some kind would be really cool, so I wrote a three line post and suggested this thing. It occurred to me that there were these smiley faces on t-shirts and balloons that was very big in the ’60s. People suggested putting an asterisk, but that didn’t seem very intuitive. And we had to label this one particular thread to differentiate the jokes. Even in those days we had social media, but that was in the form of online bulletin boards - you could send an email to this place where everyone could see it. I was a relatively new professor at Carnegie Mellon working on computer science and artificial intelligence. I try never to claim that I invented the emoticon because people always want to fight about that. Where did the idea of the emoticon come from? The father of the emoticon still finds it hard to understand why his creation became so big - and don’t even get him started on what he thinks of emojis. But Fahlman, who unleashed an advance in communication over five millennia in the making, is displeased with what his baby has become.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |