The evolution over 40 years from :-) to ?

( Business) — At 11:44 a.m. on September 19, 1982, Scott Fahlman made internet history by joining a colon, a hyphen, and a closed parenthesis.

Fahlman, Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, public “: – )” on the school’s online bulletin board, a kind of primitive social network that could only be accessed by other people on the university’s closed intranet and was limited to text.

With that smiling face, which has been dubbed the “first digital emoticon” by Guinness World Records and serving as a precursor to emojis, Fahlman attempted to solve a problem familiar to today’s internet users: conveying sarcasm online.

“Someone said something that was meant to be sarcastic. Among many readers, one person didn’t get the joke and responded with anger, hostility, and pretty soon the initial discussion was gone, and everyone was arguing with everyone,” Fahlman told . Business. “When you’re in a text-only internet medium, people can’t tell if you’re joking or not. There’s no body language or facial expressions.”

In the 40 years since then, emoticons, and later emoji, have become central elements of our conversations online and sometimes offline. More than 3,600 emojis are available for users to express all their emotions and effectively solve that original problem Fahlman identified: giving our words a deeper sense of personification, whether it’s a waving hand, a crying face, or a curious character with a monocle

“They offer things that words don’t say. They make it clear that when you say ‘good,’ what kind of good is it?” says Jennifer Daniel, director of the emoji subcommittee for the Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit organization that oversees emojis. emoji rules. “Things that we naturally do face-to-face, like our body language, our intonation, our volume, eye contact.”

What started as a few punctuation marks on a university bulletin board is now a global effort to expand our forms of digital expression, encompassing staff at tech companies and Unicode, as well as user input . But decades later, it’s still a work in progress.

The evolution of : – ) to ?

The original emoticon and its many variations soon spread beyond Carnegie Mellon. In those early days, winking faces, noseless smiles, and open-mouthed gasps grew out of the classic two-dot, dash, and parentheses smile.

But emojis would take time to prevail in the United States.

In the mid-1990s, NTT Docomo, a Japanese mobile phone company, included a small black heart on pagers. In 1997, SoftBank, another Japanese company, released a set of 90-character emoji loaded into a mobile phone model, but the graphics didn’t catch on until Docomo’s 176-character collection in 1999.

It wasn’t until Unicode got involved that expansion beyond Japan really took off. Unicode, which sets international technology standards to support different languages, took it upon itself to standardize emoji in 2010 at the request of tech companies like Apple and Google.

While there are now very clear guidelines for new emoji and user submissions, the early days of Unicode emoji standardization let through some more questionable options, like the middle finger character.

“That was introduced in Unicode back in the day, when there were fewer rules,” Jeremy Burge, founder of Emojipedia, told Business. “Nowadays, there are a lot of rules, and they’re pretty well documented and new emojis go through a pretty rigorous process.”

Apple added an official emoji keyboard available outside of Japan in 2011, a milestone that emoji experts credit as the characters’ true entry into the American online lexicon. In 2015, the tearful face emoji (?) was named Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year. This emoji is still the favorite among American users, according to a adobe studio published this month.

“Having 3,000 or so little cartoons that you can include with a tap of your finger is like having 3,000 more bits of punctuation,” Burge said. “So while I think we could get by without them, I don’t know why you would choose to live in a world where there were no emojis.”

The future of emoji

However, even 3,000 may not be enough. Just as language evolves, so do emojis.

Unicode updates the emoji set every September after reviewing submitted proposals and responding to global trends. Version 15.0.0, released Tuesday, added 20 emoji characters, including a hair clipper, maracas and jellyfish. (Emoji updates roll out to devices over time.)

But Unicode has also faced criticism over the years for its lack of representation of race, gender, sexuality and disability in previous emoji sets, which led to the release of five skin tone options. in Emoji 2.0 of 2015 and two gender options for professions in Emoji 4.0 of 2016, according to Emojipedia. Accessibility emojis were added in 2019, as were gender-inclusive partner options.

The consortium relies on subcommittee members and emoji users to power the keyboard. Daniel, the first woman to lead the Unicode emoji subcommittee and a designer at Google, has long been an advocate for more inclusive emojis. She has promoted the adoption of inclusive designs across companies so that a genderless police officer sent from a Samsung device is not greeted by an Apple user as a male police officer.

Although there are now thousands of emoji options, the main use remains true to the original goal of 40 years ago of adding a smile and some frivolity. “What you see across the board in terms of the most popular emoji being used is fun or humor or affection,” Keith Broni, editor-in-chief of Emojipedia, told Business.

As for Fahlman, he uses emoji “very, very rarely.” Most of all, he said, “I prefer the little text ones, partly because they’re my babies.”

Although Fahlman continues to work at Carnegie Mellon as a professor emeritus, researching artificial intelligence and its applications, he has given talks around the world on his creation of emoticons and acknowledges the continuing interest in it. “I have reconciled myself to the fact that whatever my achievements in artificial intelligence, this will be the first sentence of my obituary,” he said. “But it’s fun to be a little famous for something.”