WEEK2 From :-) to 😊

    Our generation uses the yellow faces on a daily basis, if its to show laughter, love or happiness, most text messages contain one of the characters, but where are they from, who created them?

    Emojis, emoticons, smileys, originally intended for sharing emotions through digital messages. The title “Inventor of the Emoticons” is contested by two people, Kevin Mackenzie in 1979 and Scott Fahlman in 1982. Mackenzie’s email contained a ‘-)’ with the intent of meaning “tongue in cheek”. However, Fahlman’s message in 1982 contained the more classical form of emoticons: eyes, nose, mouth ‘:-)’. Unaware of the new language that was started the spread and growth went unmonitored. In 1993 a book “The Smiley Dictionary” was published documented all the different emoticons up to that date, however with the growth of messaging and cyber platforms the book became outdated within a few weeks. Some of my personal favorites are Ronald Raegan ‘7:-)’ and the Pope  ‘+-(:-)’.

    In 1997 the company Softbank released a set of 90 emojis in black and white, to be use on computers. The Japanese creator Kurita released a set of 176 colorful emojis, and thousands have followed. More recently the development of emoji sets has been driven by the competition between message platform providers such as Google, Apple and Facebook each updating graphics, skin colors, gender appropriate versions. Surprisingly Fahlman dislikes the modern emojis, in an article in the Independent from 2012 he laments that the challenge of emoticons was to use the keyboard characters. However, the users of social media platforms could not imagine a world without emojis, even the original ones ‘:)’ have prevailed and are still used by many.

    Regarding a personal question of mine, why are emojis yellow? The answer is actually a practical one, the contrast between yellow, the background, and black, the contours, makes it easier to see the details. Therefore it was chosen over green, blue, red and all the other colors (FFCC22 is the color code if you were interested ;-) ).

    Over the past decade there has been an addition to the texting elements, GIFs and memes and bitmojis and voice message. All these ways are capable of expressing certain emotions a lot better than a plain text, are emojis becoming obsolete? I believe emojis will always be there, but do you think they will be replaced or will we keep adding elements to our texting toolbox and never let the double smile go :)) ?

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