In the last lecture there was a mention about emoticons and how they are used to add "emotions" to text-based conversation. This was of course something I had known before and sometimes I use them myself. But the fact that it was mentioned now made me search for more information about them.
It was a bit of surprise that emoticons are not at all offsprings of computer age, but they have been used in text-based conversation for a long time. This made me feel a bit silly, because of course text-based conversation has been there for a long time before computers were ever invented for example in telegrams and morse code[1].
There has been a lot of research about emoticons and agreements have been made to agree which emoticons means what emotion. :-) was for example proposed by Scott Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon University in a message on 19th September 1982[2] to sequence for joke markers. Some people have even filed and registered emoticons as trademarks and are selling licenses for the rights to use them, which sounds to me as crazy as the one Spanish woman who claims to own the sun.
But the true meaning of emoticons is to express writer´s mood to the reader or alert the responder to the temper of a statement[4]. I think emoticons have a place in the written text, because sometimes you just have to add that little something to make out your point, whether it is sarcasm or you really wan´t to share true joy with your friend.
But still one thing makes me wonder... Why there are no emoticons in books?
[1]Gajadhar, Joan & Green, John (17 July 2003) (PDF). An Analysis of Nonverbal Communication in an Online Chat Group. The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand. http://www.openpolytechnic.ac.nz/static/pdf/research/res_wp203gajadharj1.pdf.
[2]Fahlman, Scott. Website reconstruction http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/Orig-Smiley.htm
[3]Tavaramerkkilehti (National Board of Patents and Registration of Finland) (10): 27–28
[4]Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon#cite_note-30. Cited 28.01.2011.
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