Nearly everyone knows what an emoticon is, if you don’t you will soon catch up :D. Let us take a brief look at what they are, why we use them, and where you can get them.
The original smiley face was apparently used by someone called Kevin Mackenzie in 1979. It didn’t catch on though and so the person most attributed to having started the smiley face craze is attributed to Scott Fahlman between 1981 and 1982. He used the :) symbol for happy and the :( to show sadness. So what was the point?
Fahlman really wasn’t aware of what he had started but WAS aware of the need to quickly show an emotion online. Smiley faces can do what words can’t. Words only account for 5% of the information we take in while someone is talking to us. The old saying, “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it”, is very true. Modality (tone of voice) and body language make up 95% of our communication. Neither of these is possible, apart from using a webcam, over the internet. With only the written words to rely on misunderstandings are all too common – enter the emoticon!
If you talk to people anywhere online you are going to see smiley faces in action. Free e-mail services all have emoticons available as do nearly all chat rooms and forums. Yahoo messenger and msn messenger both pride themselves on their great emoticons. For any of these services you can usually see a little button that gives you options to choose for a smiley face to use, just click and go. Savvy internet communicators usually learn to use the keyboard shortcuts for the most common smiley faces.
Emoticons have become an internet language in themselves and competition is sometimes fierce to provide the best smiley faces around. Many people will choose a particular messenger service or chat room over another just for the quality of emoticons.
Some emoticons can be used anywhere though and smiley central offers free downloads that work for both msn messenger and yahoo messenger. There are also other sites that offer free emoticons for msn, including adult rated smiley faces.
Emoticons can be great fun to play with, but most importantly they keep communication lines open and clear. If you don’t want to be misunderstood use a smiley :)
