Who invented your technology? What were the circumstances? What problem were they trying to solve with their invention?
First off, how did the emoticon come to be? Where did the word even come from? According to, Academy Publication, the word is a combination of emoji and icon which equals emoticon. The reason was to add more a "human touch" to the digital world we were slowing moving towards in 1982. Computer Scientist, Scott Fahlman, was a young professor at Carnegie Mellon University at this time, when one morning, he decided to take his AI research to a whole another level. It was 11:44am on a Tuesday and posted a combination of a hyphen, a colon and a parenthetical. This was posted on CMU's "bboard". The after affects of this was that Fahlman was placed into the Guissiness World Records as the inventor of the "emoticon" which overall leaded into the well known emojis we all use in instant-messaging today. However, it took years to recover the "bboard" post due to the fact that during the 80's there was no real way to save this profound discovery. "This was retrieved from the spice vax oct-82 backup tape by Jeff Baird on September 10, 2002. The period covered is 16 September 1982 through 21 October 1982." Stated an original thread that was found 20 years later.
I found an article that Scott Fahlman wrote about the history of the emoticon and how it came be. He elaborates how his discovery was simple, yet record breaking. This later on affected (not until the late 1990's) the now famous "emoji" and lots of other emoticons that you can discover today which is used by over a billion people on a daily basis. Overall, Dr. Fahler walked, so that other people such as Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita could run into creating the emoji. In another article from CNN Business, he discusses his reasoning behind even using that smiley "emoticon" to begin with. “When you’re on a text-only internet medium, people can’t tell if you’re kidding or not. There’s no body language, no facial expressions.” This explains that his plan was to get sarcasm across, no matter how you felt and so that it could deescalate feelings of hurt that would often occur in email threads or chatrooms.
How did the invention change our world? What problems did it solve? How did it change communication? Did it have any negative effects?
Overall, this changed the world so much that now when you type the original "smiley" combo into popular platforms such as Microsoft Word it automatically changes into some form of an emoji -- really showing the passing through time. How we went from :-) to 😁. This invention changed our world because people now were to dissern what kind of okay was it. Just like how you interact with your friends on a day to day basis, you have their eye contact, body language and tone of voice. The emotions and the emojis give you that outlet that you would not get otherwise. From adding a laughing emoji, to a thumbs up or a smile, you now can tell how your best friend feels rather than just reading words on a screen. Or, as Dr. Fahlman would put it -- "giving our words a deeper sense of embodiment".
It solved the well known problem of -- is my boss mad at me, am I crazy or can I just not discern facial and expressive emotions through an email at 7am. From the same CNN article from earlier which explains the history of the emotion puts this perfectly, "...now a global effort to expand our digital forms of expression, spanning staff at tech companies and Unicode as well as input from users"
It overall changed communication with fast forward to the 1999 with the discovery of an emoji, which was used mainly in Japan for awhile before transgressing over to the United States. A group called "Unicode" was interested in making digital hearts on a computer screen, but it was not until years later they're started to shift gears a bit. They are based as an international technology company who was posed with the job to make a language barrier -- not so much of a barrier anymore. Apple and Google were the ones who asked this group to come up with something unique to add to their list. Unlike today with censorship, Unicode even pitched an idea back then with a middle finger emoji where rules, especially in Japan, were less strict. Today, there’s a lot of rules, and they’re fairly well documented and new emojis do go through quite a rigorous process.”
Today, there are over 3,000 emojis, but that does not stop Apple for demanding even more. Every September alongside the annual iPhone release and update, there are a bunch of new emojis that Unicode is constantly developing. Now, everyone has these little faces and icons at the tip of their fingers. Despite having a bunch of options, Fahlman still defaults to the thing he started. “I prefer the little text ones, partly because they’re my babies.”
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