In 1982, at Carnegie Mellon University, a group of researchers were using an online bulletin board to discuss an impressively obscure hypothetical scenario: what would happen to a drop of mercury lying on the floor of an elevator if the elevator’s cable snapped. The scenario prompted a humorous response from one participant—“WARNING! Because of a recent physics experiment, the leftmost elevator has been contaminated with mercury. There is also some slight fire damage”—followed by a note from someone else that, to a casual reader who hadn’t been following the thread, this comment might seem alarming (“yelling fire in a crowded theater is bad news . . . so are jokes on day-old comments”).
Participants thus began to suggest symbols that could be added to a post intended as a joke, ranging from percent signs to ampersands and hashtags. The clear winner came from the computer scientist Scott Fahlman, who proposed a smiley face drawn with three punctuation marks to denote a joke :-). Fahlman also typed a matching sad face :-( to suggest seriousness, accompanied by the prophetic note that “it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends.”7
Thus was the emoticon born—although the word emoticon itself, blending emotion and icon, didn’t appear until the 1990s. As Fahlman and his peers has noted, emoticons spoke to an important need: cramming as much emotional signaling as possible into onscreen conversations, in this case literally by re-creating human facial expressions in type.
Today, though, you’re more likely to hear the Japanese term—emoji—which combines the Japanese words 絵 e (picture) and 文字 moji (character). Emoji are an altogether more advanced pictographic alphabet: tiny pictures rather than punctuation marks, originated by designer Shigetaka Kurita at Japanese communications firm NTT DoCoMo in the late 1990s as a way of giving their service an edge in a fiercely competitive market.
Kurita’s initial set of 172 emoji were an instant hit among Japanese mobile Internet users—but couldn’t be used outside their originating networks. In fact, it wasn’t until 2010 that a wide range of emoji characters became fully supported globally, courtesy of the Unicode Consortium: the nonprofit organization that ensures common standards for the representation of text across all software and hardware.
Today, courtesy of Unicode’s latest incarnation, over 800 emoji characters are supported across most devices, ranging from sad and smiling and blushing faces (“smileys”) to hand gestures, cartoon characters, clothes, animals, plants, weather, vegetables, vehicles, objects, flags, and much more. Some have taken on second lives within the lexicon. The eggplant emoji, introduced in 2010, has for example become a handy euphemism thanks to its phallic appearance; while controversy over racial bias has led to the introduction of emoji with a range of different skin tones. Analysis of over 1 billion emojis in April 2015 by mobile keyboard company SwiftKey suggested that the laughing-so-hard-you’re-crying face was the single most used emoji of all; while happy-faced emojis are used more than three times as often as the sad ones.8
Does all this sound unbearably contemporary? Think again. Symbolic emotional shorthand is as old as electronic communications themselves. In the 1850s, Morse Code operators eager to compress as much meaning into as few characters as possible developed their own informal sign-off codes: 33 for “Fondest Regards,” 55 for “Best Success,” 73 for “Best Regards,” and 88 for “Love and Kisses.” And, of course, expressive doodles are far older than either letter writing or alphabets. So long as we’ve been making messages, we’ve been adorning them with feeling.