Emoticons reach their 30th birthday!!

                       

The humble smiley celebrates its 30th birthday on September 19. To celebrate, we look back on the history of emoticons, and celebrate their valuable contribution to the modern world. \o/

     

We can trace the origin of the smiley with great precision - it was introduced to the world at 11.44 on Sunday, September 19, 1982. We know this because it was sent in an email; specifically, an email sent by Scott Fahlman (above), a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in the USA. In his email to the CMU computer science bulletin board, he suggested the symbol as a solution to the tricky problem of telling when someone was joking in a text email. He wrote:

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
:-)
Read it sideways.

And so the smiley was born. Helpfully, Fahlman also invented the frowny in the same email, continuing:

Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use
:-(

Fahlman's suiggestion quickly caught on, and rapidly spread beyond Carnegie Mellon to other universities... and, eventually, the world.

  

However, while Fahlman is credited with introducing the modern smiley to the world, he was very nearly beaten to it by one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century. Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita (among other classic works), had suggested something very similar to the emoticon in an interview with the New York Times in 1969:

NYT: How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?

Nabokov: I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.

However, Nabokov never took his suggestion any further, and so the world had to wait another 13 years before being able to typographically express the fact that they were smiling as they wrote something.

  
But even then, Nabokov wasn't the first in the pre-history of the emoticon. Way back in 1887, in his essay "For Brevity and Clarity", the great American journalist and satirist Ambrose Bierce also proposed a smiley-style humour indicator (seen above) that uses a bracket lying on its side to indicate a grin. He named his invention the "snigger point" - but, sadly, it never caught on.

 

And Bierce's 1887 contribution isn't even the earliest proto-emoticon known about. That honour goes to satirical US magazine Puck, which suggested the above set of sort-of smileys six years earlier, in 1881.

 

Since Fahlman's email in 1982 ushered the world into the emoticon era (and as the digital text communication exploded, with email, bulletin boards, instant messaging, SMS text messages, and eventually social networks) the range of available emoticons also expanded. Soon after Fahlman's original message, his peers started suggesting variants. But it was in the 1990s, when instant messaging companies such as AOL started automatically converting emoticons into actual pictures, that they became a core part of the online experience. Fahlman isn't a fan of the picture smiley, however - he wrote: "Personally, I think this destroys the whimsical element of the original."

The Japanese style has now gradually spread to Western audiences, with the two character sets being combined to open up vast new territories of multicultural emoticon use. Above, for example, you can see the universally recognised emoticons for (top to bottom) a bemused shrug, a person flipping two tables over in anger, and a person shamefacedly putting the upturned tables neatly back again.

In Japan, meanwhile, emoticons have also turned from typographical symbols into pictures. Known as emoji, these again cover a much wider range than Western emoticon pictures, and traditionally came built-in to many phones, with each major phone network having their own set of emoji. With the expansion of smartphones, many emoji have now become standardised, and have been made available in smartphones ranging from the iPhone to Windows Phones

Emoticons don't just indicate whether you're happy or sad. It's possible that the way you use emoticons can predict how else you communicate, and what kind of person you are.

For example, research carried out by Tyler Schnoebelen of Stanford University suggests that the simple issue of whether you include a nose in your emoticon - :-)versus :) - might even give away how old you are.

Those who used the nose emoticon (at least in tweets written in American English) also tended to write emoticons less frequently overall, wrote longer tweets, tended to use proper spelling, and were more likely to discuss subjects like CNN, Google or Oprah Winfrey (above left). Those who used noseless tweets used more abbreviations, wrote shorter tweets, spelled things wrong, swore more often, and were more likely to talk about Rebecca Black, Jessie J or Miley Cyrus (above right). Schnoebelen suggests that this indicates a difference in age between the groups - he suspects that emoticons with noses are used by older people than ones without.

Schnoebelen also found that almost all emoticons were used by a higher percentage of women than men - with one exception. The tongue-sticking-out :-P is the ony one he found that had more male users.