As the first Internet entered its new role as digital terra incognita, the possibilities were endless. With new frontiers for humanity to explore and live on, one of the biggest unknowns was how language would evolve in this new space.

Create an expression

Considering that we have lost the opportunity to express emotions with visual cues, it will be very easy to lose meaning and humanity in the intertwining of digital communication. So, in an effort to more effectively convey humor (and its lack thereof), Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman proposed a pictorial hierarchy for describing joke attempts on the university’s online bulletin board (called a “bboard”).

The professor’s article, dated September 19, 1982, published at 11:44, read:

I recommend the following string to indicate jokes:
🙂
Read from the side. In fact, it’s probably more economical to label things that aren’t jokes, given current trends. For this use
🙁

We’ve come a long way since this message was posted on the Carnegie Mellon billboard 40 years ago. In the 1990s, the colon expression did not become popular immediately, as the Internet expanded beyond universities and the military, and broke into people’s homes. People with home computers and Internet connections can broadcast variants such as 😉 for a winking face and >:-( for an angry face) alongside the original emoticons.

Evolution of expressions

Typography continued to evolve with the development of wings in the 1990s, allowing users to access symbols using a keyboard. Pictographic images of everything from emoticons to pointing fingers to airplanes and arrows were now available at the touch of a button.

In fact, the wrappers were a modified alphabet – a special font that drew a letter in the form of a symbol.

Windings was born in 1990 / Photo Wikipedia

Kaomoji was also created as the Japanese equivalent of Falman’s phrases, but readers didn’t have to turn their heads. Kaomoji users can also choose from a variety of different kaomojis to depict the same emotion, such as joy or confusion. Kaomoji was first developed in the 1980s, but has been revived in the last decade thanks to meme culture.

Kaomoji was also popular in our country / Photo dev.to

Smileys are now 40 years old and look old-fashioned, but it’s still too early to delete them. You may think that emojis are all the rage these days, but look what happens when you send a message with the emoticon 🙂 on the messenger – it will be automatically replaced with and in some cases even the corresponding Emoji.